A new chart set to be released later today by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee details a startling statistic: "Over 100 Million People in U.S. Now Receiving Some Form Of Federal Welfare." "The federal government administers nearly 80 different overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs," the Senate Budget Committee notes. However, the committee states, the figures used in the chart do not include those who are only benefiting from Social Security and/or Medicare.
Food stamps and Medicaid make up a large--and growing--chunk of the more than 100 million recipients. "Among the major means tested welfare programs, since 2000 Medicaid has increased from 34 million people to 54 million in 2011 and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) from 17 million to 45 million in 2011," says the Senate Budget Committee. "Spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach $800 billion over the next decade."
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators should take a fresh look at 15-year-old standards on radiofrequency energy from mobile phones, an investigative arm of the U.S. Congress said on Tuesday amid lingering concerns the devices may cause brain tumors.
Before a mobile phone comes on the U.S. market, it is first tested to ensure its emissions are within a limit determined by the Federal Communications Commission to be safe for human exposure.
But that limit may not reflect the latest research, and testing may not reflect the actual conditions under which mobile phones are used, such as when stored directly against the body in a pocket while someone talks through an ear piece, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
***UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune reported on August 4, 2012, that Walmart will be selling GE sweet corn in the very near future. Walmart can no longer hide behind its PR doublespeak. Now, more than ever, we must send a strong message that we refuse to buy Walmart's unlabeled, untested and potentially unsafe GE sweet corn!
Why is Walmart hiding behind its misleading, greenwashed corporate PR?
Food & Water Watch and our allies have collected over 460,000 petition signatures asking Walmart not to carry Monsanto's new genetically engineered sweet corn, which could be planted this spring. Instead of doing the right thing and rejecting this unlabeled, untested and potentially unsafe produce, Walmart has issued misleading PR statements that are nothing but corporate doublespeak. Without a firm public statement of rejection, Walmart's assertions that it "cares about consumers" are utterly meaningless.
NEW YORK (AP) - A judge who once tried to stop collection worldwide of an $18 billion environmental judgment in Ecuador against energy company Chevron continued his criticisms of the award on Tuesday in litigation that seeks a declaration that the judgment was the product of fraud.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said some of the actions involving courts in Ecuador "unquestionably were tainted" before the award was announced in February 2011, but he said it was too soon to say the judgment cannot be enforced in New York. His order last year banning enforcement of the judgment worldwide was overturned by a federal appeals court that said he had overstepped his authority.
A judge in Ecuador imposed the judgment for pollution that occurred when oil company Texaco was operating in the Ecuadorean rainforest, between 1972 and 1990. Texaco became a Chevron subsidiary in 2001. Chevron has long claimed that a 1998 agreement Texaco signed with Ecuador after a $40 million cleanup absolves it of liability. Ecuadoreans say the agreement did not protect the company from the claims of individuals, and they say the cleanup was fraudulent.
Facebook has become such a pervasive force in modern society that increasing numbers of employers, and even some psychologists, believe people who aren't on social networking sites are 'suspicious.'
The German magazine Der Taggspiegel went so far as to point out that accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik have common ground in their lack of Facebook profiles.
On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don't use the site.
The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant's account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted. Slate.com tech reporter Farhad Manjoo wrote in an advice column that young people shouldn't date anyone who isn't on Facebook.
MONDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Chronic exposure to an artificial butter flavoring ingredient, known as diacetyl, may worsen the harmful effects of a protein in the brain linked to Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study.
The findings should serve as a red flag for factory workers with significant exposure to the food-flavoring ingredient, researchers from the University of Minnesota said in the report published in a recent issue of the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.
Diacetyl is used to give a buttery taste and aroma to common food items such as margarines, snack foods, candy, baked goods, pet foods and other products. The investigators pointed out that previous studies have already linked diacetyl to respiratory and other health problems among workers at microwave popcorn and food-flavoring plants.
The US Drought Monitor reported a nearly threefold increase in areas of extreme drought over the past week in the nine Midwestern states where three quarters of the country's corn and soybean crops are produced.
"That expansion of D3 or extreme conditions intensified quite rapidly and we went from 11.9 percent to 28.9 percent in just one week," Brian Fuchs, a climatologist and Drought Monitor author, told AFP.
"For myself, studying drought, that's rapid. We've seen a lot of things developing with this drought that were unprecedented, especially the speed." Almost two thirds of the continental United States are now suffering drought conditions, the largest area recorded since the Drought Monitor project started in 1999.
If you've been reading the latest, you know that Komen for the Cure has been caught in mammography propaganda fraud; scientists recently blasted the agenda of deception.
Check out this video to learn about Komen's deceptive "pink washing" practice:
Farming is one of the most difficult ways to earn a living. You'd think that with all the innovations mankind has developed over the centuries, we could make farmers' lives easier. But as it turns out, sometimes miracles of modern science make things tougher. Literally.
Take genetically modified organisms (GMO) for instance. For now, let's ignore the controversy over its safety, usefulness and ethical issues. The main issue for those guys actually growing and harvesting the stuff is much more practical. As it turns out, corn modified to stand tall and tough against pests is also wreaking havoc on tractor tires.
Mark Newhall of Farm Show Magazine tells American Public Media's Marketplace that after the stalks are cut during harvest, the leftover stubs are like "having a field of little spears."
Charlottesville, VA (June 26, 2012). Researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine and the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology at UCLA have found that a diet enriched with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid, and curcumin, a component of the Indian spice turmeric, can protect the injured spinal cord and minimize the clinical and biochemical effects of spinal cord myelopathy in rats. This finding is fleshed out in the article "Dietary therapy to promote neuroprotection in chronic spinal cord injury. Laboratory investigation," by Langston Holly, M.D., and colleagues, published today online in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine. DHA reduces inflammation and provides structural material to plasma membranes. Curcumin produces strong anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. Both agents are safe to use and have been documented to have positive effects on the injured brain. Thus the researchers hypothesized that the combined effects of DHA and curcumin could protect the spinal cord from the cascade of cellular and related biological injuries that result from chronic cord injury.
Cervical spondylotic myelopathy is the most common disorder of the spine found in middle-aged patients. Neurological deficits associated with this disorder are related to a primary mechanical spinal injury that is followed by a secondary biological injury. Wear and tear on the spine, due to age or congenital narrowing of the spinal canal, leads to mechanical compression of the spinal cord. This cord compression in turn leads to biological cell injury or death and consequent neurological dysfunction. The primary mechanical injury can usually be corrected by surgery or other management strategies; to date, the secondary biological injury has been more difficult to treat.
DETROIT (AP) -- Abandoned and neglected parts of Detroit are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the bodies of murder victims. And authorities acknowledge there's little they can do.
At least a dozen bodies have turned up in 12 months, many of them purposely hidden or discarded in alleys, fields and vacant houses or garages. Seven of the dead are believed to have been slain outside Detroit and then dumped within the city.
ScienceDaily (June 4, 2012) - In a new study of the effects of soy supplements for postmenopausal women, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the USC Keck School of Medicine found no significant differences -- positive or negative -- in overall mental abilities between those who took supplements and those who didn't.
While questions have swirled for years around a possible link between soy consumption and changes in cognition, this research offers no evidence to support such claims. "There were no large effects on overall cognition one way or another," said the study's lead author, Victor Henderson, MD, professor of health research and policy and of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford.
The findings from the 2.5-year study in middle-aged and older women, which was larger and longer than any previous trials on soy use, appear in the June 5 issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The results are in line with the largest previous study in this area: a 12-month trial of Dutch women during which daily soy intake showed "no significant effect on cognitive endpoints." That work was published in a 2004 issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association.
With the growing worldwide incidence of diabetes, a new study reveals that traditional Aboriginal and Indian plant extracts show potential for managing the disease.
Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology have investigated 12 medicinal plant extracts to determine their potential to slow down two key enzymes in carbohydrate metabolism which affect blood sugar and diabetes.
"Diabetes represents a global public health burden, with the World Health Organisation estimating that more than 180 million people worldwide currently suffer from the disease," said researcher Associate Professor Enzo Palombo.
"More than 800 plants are used as traditional remedies in one or other form for the treatment of diabetes, but the management of the disease without any side effects is still a challenge."
MYFOXNY.COM - Facebook's share price dipped below $20 on Thursday after reporting slowing growth and an admission of an alarming number of fake accounts.
In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the social media company said that as many as 83 million of its accounts are fake.
It also reported that as many as five percent of its active users have duplicate accounts.
Facebook members grew to 955 million this year.
It says 1.5 percent of its accounts are likely spam or accounts set up for other malicious activity. The fake accounts are concentrated in developing markets, according to the filing.
The spike in crop prices this year may be an early glimpse into a chronic food crisis that could unfold over the next forty years, says well-known money manager Jeremy Grantham.
We are "about five years into a chronic global food crisis that is unlikely to fade for many decades, at least until the global population has considerably declined from its likely peak of over nine billion in 2050," wrote GMO's Grantham in his recent quarterly letter to investors.
"It will threaten poor countries with increased malnutrition and starvation and even collapse," he added. "Resource squabbles and waves of food-induced migration will threaten global stability and global growth."
In the last three months alone, wheat prices (:Wc1) are up 41 percent, corn (:Cc1) is up 29 percent and prices for soybeans (:Sc1) are up 17 percent.
OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) - San Francisco police shot a black teen-ager to death because he ran away when they asked him if he'd paid his train fare, the teen's mother claims in Federal Court.
Denika Chatman sued the City and County of San Francisco, its police chief, and Officers Matthew Lopez and Richard Hastings, on her own behalf and for her late son, Kenneth Harding Jr., who was 19 when he was shot to death in the afternoon of July 16, 2011.
Chatman says in her complaint that her son was getting off the T-car train at the Oakdale/Palou Muni Station around 4:30 p.m. when Lopez and Hastings "inquired about whether Harding had paid his Muni fare."
Published August 2 in Current Biology, research led by Monash University, describes how mutations to the DNA of the mitochondria can account for differences in the life expectancy of males and females. Mitochondria, which exist in almost all animal cells, are vital for life because they convert our food into the energy that powers the body.
Dr Damian Dowling and PhD student, Florencia Camus, both from the Monash School of Biological Sciences, worked with Dr David Clancy from Lancaster University to uncover differences in longevity and biological aging across male and female fruit flies that carried mitochondria of different origins. They found that genetic variation across these mitochondria were reliable predictors of life expectancy in males, but not in females.
"Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often," wrote the 19th Century author Mark Twain. Although he courted more than his fair share of controversies, Twain lived at a time when public and published words were possessed by a minority. Mere talk - those mundane conversations and concerns his wit so carefully skewered - existed far from worldly words and actions.
Eleven decades after the author's death, such boundaries are less certain.
Recent events on Twitter show it is now time to consider the unintended consequences of our very public online conversations, says Tom Chatfield.
(Reuters Health) - People with heart disease who are also depressed may get as much relief from their depression symptoms with regular exercise as with medication, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that of 101 heart patients with signs of depression, those who exercised for 90 minutes per week and those who started taking Zoloft both improved significantly compared to participants assigned to drug-free placebo pills.
Pfizer supplied the Zoloft (known generically as sertraline) and placebos for the study, but researchers said the company was not involved with any other part of it.
