U.S. Court Upholds Telecom Immunity for Surveillance of Americans
December 30th, 2011Searching for Mark Klein on Cryptogon will bring up several references to the NSA’s mass surveillance operations.
Via: Reuters:
A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens.
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Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities.
Besides the government itself, defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications Inc.
In 2008, Congress granted telecoms immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional, and dismissed the claims against the companies.
In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit agreed. The appeals court covers nine Western U.S. states.
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In a separate ruling, the 9th Circuit on Thursday allowed a separate case against the government to proceed, in which plaintiffs allege a communications dragnet of ordinary citizens.
That lawsuit claims the National Security Agency diverted Internet traffic into secure rooms in AT&T facilities across the country. The proposed class action alleges “an unprecedented suspicionless general search” throughout the communications network.
FDA Won’t Regulate Use of Antibiotics in Healthy Livestock Intended for Human Consumption
December 30th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration’s move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed.
Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human consumption.
Critics say the U-turn, which comes amid the FDA’s own stated concerns over food safety, is at odds with its obligations to protect the public.
The groups also criticised the timing of the announcement, which was made during the holiday season and disclosed only in the federal register.
The use of low doses of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed contributes to drug-resistant superbugs, according to food and health experts.
One leading food policy writer described the policy reversal as “pathetic” and “dismaying.”
“It’s dismaying, and obviously something they felt sheepish about, otherwise it wouldn’t have been released this week,” Michael Pollan, author of the Onmivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, told the Guardian.
“When Margaret Hamburg became the head of the FDA, she indicated this was a high priority for them and that she realised how much of a problem the profligate use of antibiotics was. She said she was going to treat this issue as if her hair was on fire. This isn’t the way someone acts when their hair is on fire.”
Pollan said there was “no question” that meat could be produced without human antibiotics, as the EU has already banned them.
The FDA first acknowledged in 1977 that the overuse of antibiotics in healthy livestock for growth promotion and disease prevention was unsafe and could promote antibiotic resistant bacteria that could infect people. An advisory committee at the time recommended that the FDA immediately withdraw approval for two drugs, penicillin and tetracycline, for subtherapeutic uses of the drugs in livestock.
Last week, in a statement in the Federal Register, the FDA says it plans instead to allow the industry to self-regulate and “focus its efforts for now on the potential for voluntary reform and the promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health”.
The problem, said Pollan, boils down to a lack of political will in the face of powerful industry interests. “There’s a lot of corporate money in politics these days,” he said. “Here you’re going up against not just one powerful industry, but two. This administration has had enough trouble going after individual powerful industries. That they would prevail against two of them joined together was too much to hope for.”
Livestock consume about 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US.
The History of MIT’s Blatant Suppression of Cold Fusion
December 30th, 2011Every citizen who is concerned about the future of clean energy generation and the future of our environment should read this report. Every MIT student, every MIT graduate, and every financial contributor to MIT should read it. Judge for yourself where the facts lead.
—Dr. Eugene F. Mallove, MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report
Via: PESN:
I am very interested in the events that took place immediately after the birth of Cold Fusion in 1989, when Pons and Fleischmann announced the existence of their technology to the world. Although cold fusion systems at the time were not ready for the market place, they proved the effect was real — a fact the establishment could not allow the public to accept.
Immediately after the announcement was made, the “mainstream” scientific community went on the attack. The late Eugene Mallove was in the middle of it, being employed at MIT in the news office — before resigning in protest of the institution’s misconduct. In a featured article for Infinite Energy Magazine, Mallove detailed exactly what took place that led to his resignation, and the depth of hatred that many professors at MIT had for Pons and Fleischmann’s work. The article titled, “MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report” also looks at how the replication performed by the institution’s Plasma Fusion Center actually did produce positive results, how data from the experiment was altered by unknown individuals at least twice, and how the hot fusion scientists in charge of such tests were far too biased to conduct proper research.
Related: Murdered: Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
Much of What Transpires in the Name of Military Research and Development…
December 30th, 2011Via: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
‘EM fields initiate the stress response by interacting with electrons moving within DNA’
December 30th, 2011Via: Martin Blank, PhD – Columbia University:
Electromagnetic (EM) fields have been used therapeutically for accelerated healing and pain control, but they have also been associated with adverse health effects. To understand these biological effects, we have been studying the interaction of low frequency EM fields with cells at both the cellular and molecular levels. Our studies with cells have shown that 60Hz EM fields induce stress genes and stress response proteins in cells. The stress response is a protective mechanism induced by many potentially harmful environmental stimuli and characterized by the synthesis of specific proteins that assist the renaturation and transport of other proteins. Our studies suggest that EM fields initiate the stress response by interacting with electrons moving within DNA. We have identified a 900 base pair segment associated with the response to EM fields, that when removed eliminates the response, and when transfected into a reporter construct, causes the construct to become EM field responsive. We have also investigated the mechanism of EM field interactions at the molecular level through effects on three reactions, electron transfer in cytochrome oxidase, ATP hydrolysis by the Na,K-ATPase, and the Belousov-Zhabotinski (BZ) reaction (the catalyzed oxidation of malonic acid). The BZ reaction is studied with ordinary reagents, so there is no problem of impurities as with biological preparations. All three reactions show:
• EM accelerates the reaction rate, i.e., electron transfer rate
• EM competes with the chemical force, so its effect varies inversely with the reaction rate
• Thresholds for interaction are low, comparable to levels found by epidemiology
• Effects vary with frequency, and there are different optima for the reactions studied: ATPase (60Hz), cytochrome oxidase (800Hz), BZ (250Hz)
These properties are consistent with the idea that EM fields affect many biological systems by interacting with electrons moving during redox reactions and also within DNA.
Research Credit: RG
TSA Got Everything It Wanted for Christmas
December 30th, 2011Via: Slashdot:
“It looks like Congress’ recent jabs at TSA were just posturing after all. Last Friday, President Obama signed a spending act passed by both houses of Congress. The act gives TSA a $7.85 billion budget increase for 2012 and includes funding for 12 additional multi-modal Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams and 140 new behavior detection officers. It even includes funding for 250 shiny new body scanners, which was originally cut from the funding bill last May.”
Cutting Edge Medical Procedures Used on Grievously Ill Buys “Misery We Would Not Inflict on a Terrorist”
December 30th, 2011Dr. Terry Wahls didn’t, “Go gently.”
Via: Zocalo Public Square:
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).
Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.
Mexican Drug Cartels Have Their Own Radio Communications Networks
December 29th, 2011Via: AP:
When convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming.
The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk.
The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.
Related:
DEA Launders Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc.
China Wins $700 Million Afghan Oil and Gas Deal — Why Didn’t the U.S. Bid?
December 29th, 2011The article below states that, “China has not participated in the war effort,” but it fails to mention that China financed the war by purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. debt.
Just a guess: Maybe some of those debt purchases came with strings attached. U.S. elites got their nonsense war, a bunch of opium and wealth transfer to the mercenary industrial complex, and China will wind up with what’s in the dirt.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
In a deal finalized on Wednesday, China’s National Petroleum Corporation became the first foreign company to tap into Afghanistan’s oil and gas reserves. Chinese officials have estimated that the deal could be worth at least $700 million, but some say China could earn up to 10 times that.
China has not participated in the war effort, but it has managed to gain the biggest stake in Afghan minerals. In 2007, China inked a $3 billion deal securing access to copper mines in Mes Aynak, south of Kabul.
The latest Sino-Afghan agreement strengthens the Asian nation’s foothold here and could benefit the economic development of Afghanistan. With few viable industries in Afghanistan, Western forces here looking for a way to restore economic independence and stability have long touted the country’s mineral resources.
Rootworms Becoming Resistant to Monsanto’s Genetically Modified Corn
December 29th, 2011Via: AP:
One of the nation’s most widely planted crops — a genetically engineered corn plant that makes its own insecticide — may be losing its effectiveness because a major pest appears to be developing resistance more quickly than scientists expected.
