Thursday, November 20th, 2014
CHARLIE SAVAGE and JEREMY W. PETERS, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is what we can expect from a Republican Congress. Your privacy was just fatally compromised by the Republican Party. They want to shrink government to a size you can "drown in a bathtub," except when they don't. If you voted for these aging white men, don't whine about your loss of privacy. This is just the beginning. Wait until the new Congress is sworn in.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky before the vote. Mr. McConnell led opposition to the bill.
Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.
Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58 to 42 for consideration.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who drafted the bill, blamed what he said was fear-mongering by the bill’s opponents for its defeat. “Fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions,” he said. “This nation deserves more than that.”
Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, worked hard to defeat the bill, which […]
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Thursday, November 20th, 2014
Carly Schwartz, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: When I read this report all I could think of was the number of lives that were lost because a medicine that has few negative side-effects was denied to sufferers.
Marijuana leaves
Credit: www.forbes.com
Over the past few years, research has revealed that marijuana can both destroy certain cancer cells and reduce the growth of others. Now, a new study in mice has found that when combined with radiation treatment, cannabis can effectively shrink one of the most aggressive types of brain tumors.
In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George’s University of London outlined the “dramatic reductions” they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group.
“We’ve shown that cannabinoids could play a role in treating one of the most aggressive cancers in adults,” Dr. Wai Liu, one of the study’s lead authors, wrote in an op-ed earlier this week. “The results are promising…it could provide […]
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Thursday, November 20th, 2014
Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent - Reuters
Stephan: Science is finally beginning to study the financial collapse and the culture of U.S. Banking. Not surprisingly the failure of both the Bush and Obama administrations to hold banking criminals accountable has resulted in a continuation of the culture of corruption. This study validates the point I have been making in SR for years: Profit is the only social priority in the United States. Our financial structure is a government sanctioned criminal enterprise.
The full study can be seen at www.nature.com/nature 
Wall Street
Credit: thinkprogress.org
A banking culture that implicitly puts financial gain above all else fuels greed and dishonesty and makes bankers more likely to cheat, according to the findings of a scientific study.
Researchers in Switzerland studied bank workers and other professionals in experiments in which they won more money if they cheated, and found that bankers were more dishonest when they were made particularly aware of their professional role.
When bank employees were primed to think less about their profession and more about normal life, however, they were less inclined to dishonesty.
“Many scandals..have plagued the financial industry in the last decade,” Ernst Fehr, a researcher at the University of Zurich who co-led the study, told reporters in a telephone briefing. “These scandals raise the question whether the business culture in the banking industry is favouring, or at least tolerating, fraudulent or unethical behaviours.”
Fehr’s team conducted a laboratory game with bankers, then repeated it with other types of workers as comparisons.
The first study involved 128 employees all levels of a large international bank — the researchers were sworn to secrecy about […]
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2014
Stephan: I think we can safely and accurately say that the people of the United States, collectively, while they may care about their own children, or the children of their friends, do not care for children in general. There is a lot of political and religious bombastic blathering about caring for children but the actual facts tell a different story. In this country we have the highest level of physical abuse of children in the developed world. We also have the highest level of food stress with 17 million children going hungry at least part of the year. And, as this report spells out we have 2.5 million minor children who are homeless. Please also note that once again Red value states score significantly worse than Blue value states.
Credit: Shutterstock
One out of every 30 children in the U.S. experienced homelessness last year. That makes nearly 2.5 million children who, in 2013, lived in shelters, on the streets, in cars, on campgrounds or doubled up with other families in tight quarters, often moving from one temporary solution to another, according to “America’s Youngest Outcasts,” a report published Monday by the the National Center on Family Homelessness at the American Institutes for Research.
With an increase of 8 percent in just one year between 2012 and 2013, the number of homeless children in this country has reached a historic high, the report says.
“As a nation of wealth and opportunity [one in 30 children] is not something we should tolerate,” Carmela DeCandia, director of the National Center on Family Homelessness, tells Newsweek. “We haven’t been paying attention,” she says, and “we need to before the goal becomes out of reach.”
In 2010, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness presented a plan called Opening Doors, which stated as goals ending […]
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Wednesday, November 19th, 2014
Jake Bernstein, - ProPublica
Stephan: Here is the update on the New York Federal Reserve and Carmen Segarra's tapes (See the SR archive). This whole thing stinks, and this is why I believe historians will see the Obama Administration's response to the financial crisis as deeply flawed and destructive of national integrity.
New York Federal Reserve Building
Credit: www.nyc-architecture.com
As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York moved to beef up its oversight of Wall Street two years ago, the team charged with supervising the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, was in turmoil.
New York Fed examiners embedded at JPMorgan complained about being blocked from doing their jobs. In frustration, some requested transfers. Top New York Fed managers knew about the problems, according to interviews and secret recordings of internal meetings obtained by ProPublica. Similar frustrations had surfaced among examiners at other banks as well.
“You’re not the only one experiencing difficulties at an institution,” one New York Fed manager told Carmen Segarra, an examiner stationed at Goldman Sachs who made the surreptitious recordings. “You’ve heard about all the issues at JPMorgan.”
Listen to more excerpts of the Carmen Segarra tapes »
In meetings in early 2012, the manager, Johnathan Kim, described how bosses in the JPMorgan team had stymied examiners by blocking access to bank information and constraining independent inquiries in ways that “grinds everything to a […]
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