How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat
September 12th, 2016Via: New York Times:
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease — including many of today’s dietary recommendations — may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the new JAMA paper.
The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive. One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Another scientist was Fredrick J. Stare, the chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department.
In a statement responding to the JAMA report, the Sugar Association said that the 1967 review was published at a time when medical journals didn’t typically require researchers to disclose funding sources or potential financial conflicts of interest. The New England Journal of Medicine did not begin to require financial disclosures until 1984.
Trump Would Spend Hundreds of Billions More on Military
September 11th, 2016[???]
Via: Reuters:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s U.S. military buildup plan would cost hundreds of billions of dollars – but with no apparent strategy, defense experts from across the political spectrum said on Thursday.
“I haven’t seen any kind of strategy,” said William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. “He (Trump) says nobody is going to challenge us because we will be so strong. But that’s not a strategy. It’s just a kind of wish-fulfillment.”
U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, a top Trump backer who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the proposal was based on recommendations from groups such as the National Defense Panel and served as a statement of Trump’s commitment to build the military.
“I believe this lays out a framework for rebuilding the military, and it represents a commitment by Donald Trump to make this a priority,” Sessions said in an interview. “If you don’t have presidential leadership really defending the need for a robust national defense, you’re not going to maintain the defense budget.”
Trump’s proposal, unveiled in a speech on Wednesday, did not spell out how he would accommodate the additional manpower and hardware as the United States shutters military bases, or where and for what purposes the larger forces would be employed. There were no cost estimates and Trump proposed revenue-raising steps that budget experts called insufficient.
Hillary Clinton Collapses, Carried Away from 9/11 Ceremony
September 11th, 2016More like dragged. Watch her feet. Wow. That was a bad one.
Via: Zdenek Gazda:
Hillary Clinton 9/11 NYC pic.twitter.com/q9YnsjTxss
— Zdenek Gazda (@zgazda66) September 11, 2016
China Will Resurrect The World’s Largest Plane
September 11th, 2016Via: Popular Science:
On August 30, members of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AICC) and the Antonov Corporation, the leading Ukrainian aviation company, signed an agreement to restart production of the AN-225, the world’s largest cargo aircraft.
Thousands Protest North Dakota Pipeline
September 9th, 2016Via: CBC:
Thousands of people have joined the Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s fight against construction of a contentious oil pipeline, a showdown Indigenous leaders in North Dakota warn won’t end anytime soon.
They’re opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, a multimillion-dollar project that’s supposed to transport light sweet crude oil from the Bakken oilfield near the Canadian border to Illinois.
India: World’s Largest General Strike
September 9th, 2016Via: Alternet:
Trade unions leaders are reticent to say how many people struck work on September 2, 2016. They simply cannot offer a firm number. But they do say that the strike – the seventeenth general strike since India adopted its new economic policy in 1991 – has been the largest ever. The corporate news media – no fan of strikes – reported that the number of strikers exceeded the estimated 150 million workers. A number of newspapers suggested that 180 million Indian workers walked off the job. If that is the case, then this is the largest reported general strike in history.
5,300 Wells Fargo Employees Fired Over 2 Million Phony Accounts
September 9th, 2016Via: CNN:
Everyone hates paying bank fees. But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn’t even sign up for.
That’s exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide.
On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo (WFC) employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts — without their customers knowing it — since 2011.
The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money.
“Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.
Dear Mark Zuckerberg
September 8th, 2016Via: Aftenposten:
Dear Mark Zuckerberg.
I follow you on Facebook, but you don’t know me. I am editor-in-chief of the Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten. I am writing this letter to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove a documentary photography from the Vietnam war made by Nick Ut.
Not today, and not in the future.
The demand that we remove the picture came in an e-mail from Facebook’s office in Hamburg this Wednesday morning. Less than 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, and before I had time to give my response, you intervened yourselves and deleted the article as well as the image from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.
To be honest, I have no illusions that you will read this letter. The reason why I will still make this attempt, is that I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.
North Korea Nuclear Test Suspected After ‘Artificial’ Quake
September 8th, 2016Via: BBC:
North Korea is suspected of carrying out its fifth test of a nuclear bomb, after a magnitude 5.3 earthquake was detected close to its test site.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said it had been an “artificial quake”.
An unnamed South Korean government source said it was highly likely to have been a nuclear test.
There has been no confirmation from the North, but previous artificial earthquakes in that area and of that magnitude have all been nuclear tests.
Google Drones Will Deliver Chipotle Burritos at Virginia Tech
September 8th, 2016Via: WTVR:
Project Wing, a drone project in Google’s X lab, will begin testing drone delivery of burritos at Virginia Tech later this month. Google expects to conduct a few hundred deliveries over the course of several days or potentially weeks.
Burritos won’t be delivered just anywhere on campus. Testing will be confined to a closed site. Students and employees from an adjacent building will be invited to order burritos on a special kiosk and watch as their food is flown several hundred meters over open ground. The food will be prepared on site in a Chipotle truck.
The drones — which will fly autonomously — will lower the burritos to the ground via a tether. Google said it chose to test food delivery to learn how to package sensitive cargo.
