07.12.12

Leftover Links – Facebook uses your reputation to push political causes without asking you, Catching up With Gates in Education, pollution, corruption.

Posted in Site News at 6:44 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• New Google Chrome beta lets webcams go plugin-free, video chat gets a lot less Flashy

  Good riddance.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Due to insufficient practical inspection, clothing often contains illegal toxic chemicals..

  • In Blow to Big Pharma, India to Hand Out Generics

    The $5 billion dollar initiative will provide free medicine to hundreds of millions of Indians who today go without access to health care, officials said Thursday. The new initiative will offer 348 types of medication to patients across the country that will not come from big pharma. Legislators in Delhi plan to utilize a network of government-funded hospitals and clinics to provide the medicine,

  • Even Low Doses Of Fast Food Do Serious Damage

    they examined results of a study conducted over a period of 16 years beginning in 1993, which looked at the eating habits of 52,000 Chinese residents of Singapore who have experienced a recent and sudden transition from traditional foods to Western-style fast food.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Poisoning Arafat

    An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it. … I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement – which was killed by the assassination of Rabin. … Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and – more important – to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it.

  • US gov’t nutty over Wikileaks

    A US official told Birgitta Jónsdóttir that the US has no wish to prosecute her or question her “involuntarily”, but there is evidence suggesting this is not true. Evidence that the US is looking to prosecute Julian Assange and others in Wikileaks. The US Army admits it is investigating the Bradley Manning Support Group.
    This group was formed after Bradley Manning was arrested to provide him with moral and legal support. Since when is that a crime?

  • Africa’s land and family farms – up for grabs?

    RMS summarizes this as, “The Gates Foundation is promoting a scheme with connections with Monsanto to “help” Africa by introducing technology that African farmers can’t afford.”

• Censorship

  • House Quiety Reintroduces a Piece of SOPA

    Even after millions rallied against the passage of SOPA/PIPA, the House is still quietly trying to pass a related bill …

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima Nuclear Disaster ‘Clearly Man-Made’, says Parliamentary Panel

    the Diet’s Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, rejected claims by the plant’s owner that the earthquake and tsunami ‘could not have been foreseen’ by saying: “Despite having a number of opportunities to take measures, regulatory agencies and TEPCO management deliberately postponed decisions, did not take action or took decisions that were convenient for themselves.”

  • Shocking Health Effects of Commonly Used Pesticide: Brain Problems, Sexual Deformities and Paralysis

    Endocrine disruptors are linked to breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early puberty and diabetes in humans and alarming mutations in wildlife. They are also suspected in the epidemic of behavior and learning problems in children which has coincided, many say, with wide endocrine disruptor use. … in April, research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented new evidence of the ability of endocrine disruptors–in this case the pesticide, chlorpyrifos (found in Dow’s pesticide Dursban) –to harm developing fetuses.

  • A deep drought has destroyed much of the US wheat crop and may destroy the corn crop too.

  • WTF: Monsanto to Gain Immunity from Federal Law?

    The Secretary of Agriculture would be required to grant a permit for the planting or cultivation of a genetically engineered crop, regardless of environmental impact. [thanks to a sleazy one liner in a 9,000 page bill]

  • Dramatic Shifts in Benthic Microbial Eukaryote Communities following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

    post-spill communities contain mainly predatory and scavenger taxa alongside an abundance of juveniles. Based on this community analysis, our data suggest considerable (hidden) initial impacts across Gulf beaches may be ongoing, despite the disappearance of visible surface oil in the region.

• Finance

  • As ‘Statute of Limitations’ Approaches, Wall Street Crimes of 2008 Go Unpunished

    With time running out, federal agencies show no urgency in holding firms or executives to account

    Maddoff was chairman of the SEC. It looks like we will have to tax the “bailout” back from the banksters.

  • Plutonomy and the Precariat

    So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this. If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories.

    It’s worth noting that the callous and extreme views expressed in this essay are quotations from a Citibank memo.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • STUDY: Media Avoid Climate Context In Wildfire Coverage

    Consolidated media does not publish news, it publishes propaganda.

  • Is Facebook damaging your reputation with sneaky political posts?

    posts are going out under your name because at some point in the past (in some cases in the distant past) you visited a page and clicked Like. Yes, you voluntarily Liked that page and made it part of your Facebook profile. If a Facebook friend wants to go through your list of Likes, they can learn that you like the NRA or PETA or a seemingly innocuous group that you probably didn’t realize was funded by Karl Rove’s political action committee. But I doubt that you expected that simple click to result in a flood of posts under your name months later. … when Facebook uses your name to promote a page to your friends, it doesn’t provide any indication to you that it has done so.

    People should worry more about the power this gives Facebook to sway public opinion than they worry about their personal reputations.

• Education Watch

  • Louisiana Republican Supports State Funds For Religious Schools, As Long As They’re Not Islamic

  • The Weekly Update: Jindal & Co. in Louisiana, a Broadie in Arizona and Bill Gates everywhere

    News you might have missed.

    Devastating look at Louisiana charter schools, abuse of students, nonsense in Seattle and “leveraged philanthropy,” and some other badness.

  • Weekly Update, Part 2: The Gates Foundation, a smart ALEC and more charter school abuses

    ALEC’s positions on various education issues make it clear that the organization seeks to undermine public education by systematically defunding and ultimately destroying public education as we know it.

    Yes, there’s much more.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • India Moves Even More Of Its Healthcare Away From Western Pharma

    Moving to generics they can produce themselves rather than pay absurd fees for patented medicine.

  • TPP

    • A Global Attack by the One Percent

      Perhaps the most controversial of these tools would be the setting up of a three attorney tribunal, with no checks on conflicts of interest, to judge foreign corporate complaints regarding government regulations in the countries they are setting up operations in. If, for instance, a foreign owned corporation argues it is losing profits because of its host nation’s overtime laws, this tribunal could rule that the country’s taxpayers owe that corporation compensation for this loss. Such costly judgments could result from any regulations including labor law, local environmental standards, financial rules, etc. In short, the TPP’s tribunal would act as the hammer of multi-national corporate interests above the power of the states’ governments they do business in

      I agree that protectionism alone is a bad idea as a countermeasure. A better countermeasure is trade restrictions that guard people’s rights with tariffs against specific, oppressive policies.

  • ACTA

    • Post-ACTA: declassified negotiation documents on criminal provisions

      These might be handy for the next dumb treaty attack.

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