Archive for January 2010
Iraq’s deadly sites with nuclear and dioxin contamination
More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.
Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.
The environment minister, Narmin Othman, said high levels of dioxins on agricultural lands in southern Iraq, in particular, were increasingly thought to be a key factor in a general decline in the health of people living in the poorest parts of the country…
“We have been regulating and monitoring this and we have been urgently trying to assemble a database. We have had co-operation from the United Nations environment programme and have given our reports in Geneva. We have studied 500 sites for chemicals and depleted uranium. Until now we have found 42 places that have been declared as [high risk] both from uranium and toxins…”
Scrap sites remain a prime concern. Wastelands of rusting cars and war damage dot Baghdad and other cities between the capital and Basra, offering unchecked access to both children and scavengers.
The United States continues to leave an unmatched heritage through the lands we “liberate”. From Agent Orange and landmines in VietNam and Cambodia – depleted uranium rounds in the Middle East – we continue to kill and maim generations well beyond the context of battlefields.
Pic of the day: Faith healing in the wild
“In the name of Jesus! .. In the name of Jesus! ..
Keep trying, I saw it work on the 700 Club.”
Blackwater operatives training Pakistanis – Oops!
Bashir Ahmed Bilour
PESHAWAR: A senior minister from the NWFP Bashir Ahmed Bilour on has confirmed the presence of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, in the NWFP.
Bilour further disclosed that not only do Blackwater officials exist in the NWFP, they have also been imparting training to Pakistanis…
Meanwhile, the Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira also acknowledged the presence of US security agencies in Pakistan after several months of denial.
Earlier on Thursday, US Defense Secretary also admitted during an interview with a private television channel that Blackwater and DynCorp have been operating inside Pakistan.
Government officials in Pakistan end up walking a skinnier tightrope than their peers in Afghanistan or Iraq. Their predecessors relied on populist anti-US and anti-NATO agitprop for so many years that when the other shoe dropped – and sectarian fundamentalists came after them, as well – a little truth-telling of necessary alliances with the West only exacerbates grassroots hatred.
Republicans hate census – but willing to cop to the look!
Have you filled out your “2010 Congressional District Census” yet?
It’s arriving this week in mailboxes in Minnesota, New York and Washington state. At first glance, it might appear to be related to the upcoming once-a-decade count of every man, woman and child in the United States.
It’s not. It’s a Republican fundraiser and opinion poll…
“This is as egregious as it gets,” said Luz Maria Frias, director of St. Paul’s Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity and the city’s point person for raising awareness of the federal 2010 U.S. census.
“Between now and April 1, there will be an inundation of census information, and the timing of this is really suspect. It smells.”
Inside the envelope, which is labeled “DO NOT DESTROY — OFFICIAL DOCUMENT,” beneath “2010 Congressional District Census” and above the relevant congressional district and alphanumeric “Census Tracking Code” (which appears to be meaningless), appears the smaller-type phrase: “Commissioned by the Republican Party.”
Understand that Republican tactics are formulated by the same slimeballs who send phony mailers to our homes – trying to look like they’re from the Social Security Administration – to sell us supplemental medicare insurance from Bill Frist.
Conan socks it to NBC for his last week on the air!
Har!
Cutting salt intake will enhance your health
If Americans cut their salt intake by just half a teaspoon per day, it would produce public health benefits on par with reducing high cholesterol, smoking, or obesity, a new study has found.
The number of heart attacks in the U.S. could decline by up to 13 percent if adults could just slash their daily salt intake by 3 grams, or about 1,200 milligrams of sodium, according to the study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. New cases of heart disease and the number of strokes could also be expected to decline, by up to 11 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
To achieve a similar reduction in heart attacks and other heart-related problems, the researchers estimate, nationwide tobacco use would need to be halved. Alternatively, obese adults would need to reduce their body mass index by 5 percent, or all adults at low-to-medium risk for heart disease would need to take cholesterol-lowering statins.
Even a reduction in daily salt intake of just 1 gram (or about 400 milligrams of sodium) would produce “large declines” in the rates of cardiovascular events, according to the study.
“Just targeting slightly lower salt [intake] would have some benefit for everyone in the U.S.,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Kirsten
RTFA. Tons of detail, kilos of life-changing results – simply by removing grams of salt from your diet.
The toughest problem for many – I fear – are the hidden stashes of salt in prepared food, restaurants, canned and frozen foods from manufacturers who feel they need that extra dash of salt just to cover everyone’s choice.
13 months ago I essentially quit all added salt in my food preparation. My wife doesn’t add salt to food, anyway; so, there was no conflict. And I was surprised how easy it was for me.
I grew up in a family of heavy salt users. I have a favorite salt that sometimes has to be ordered in because I can’t count on getting locally [it's from Malden, England]. But, with a reasonable amount of friendly herbs and spices – no overcompensation – I have to say the decline in salt consumption has equalled the results from a similar decision I made about sugar a few years further back.
Keeping the record straight – Last decade warmest on record
A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years –1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 — for the second warmest on record.
“There’s always interest in the annual temperature numbers and a given year’s ranking, but the ranking often misses the point,” said James Hansen, GISS director. “There’s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Nino-La Nina cycle. When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find global warming is continuing unabated.”
January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s…
“The contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the United States’ temperature does not affect the global temperature much,” Hansen said.
Not meaningful to the egregious barflies serving as climate experts for Republicans, though.
GISS uses publicly available data from three sources to conduct its temperature analysis. The sources are weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperatures, and Antarctic research station measurements.
Global warming hasn’t stopped. Even if it snowed, this morning, on your commute to work. It is, after all, Winter in the northern hemisphere.
The rescue of Kiki
Nice to see a moment of good news come out of Haiti.
Ginsberg’s Howl finds a way onto film
A violent ghost from my past appears at the end
On 7 October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg brought the house down with a performance of his hallucinatory new poem, Howl. Among other things, this epic work in four parts dealt with drugs, mental illness, religion, homosexuality – the fears and preoccupations of a generation.
Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were both in the audience. Ginsberg was 29 years old. Also present was the future choreographer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. A teenager at the time, Rainer still clearly remembers that night: “Ginsberg, quite drunk, clean-shaven, in black suit and tie-less white shirt, holding a jug of rot-gut red wine, intoning and chanting the poem.” Back then, the beats were in thrall to the jazz world; Ginsberg himself explained his poem as akin to “bop refrains”.
Eight years ago, film-makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman received a call from Ginsberg’s estate asking them to make a documentary about Howl. With the 50th anniversary of the poem’s publication (and subsequent obscenity trial) approaching, the estate wanted the best. Epstein and Friedman have, between them, won Oscars and Emmys for a lifetime of work including The Times of Harvey Milk, about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California; and The Celluloid Closet, based on Vito Russo’s book about screen depictions of homosexuality. Ginsberg’s estate knew the pair could deliver an in-depth documentary on time and on budget; plus, they were queer enough to understand the social pressures that formed the poet.
Had things gone as planned, the film would have been released in 2007, and it would have been a documentary. Instead, the hybrid drama that is Howl has its world premiere…on the opening night of the Sundance film festival. Epstein and Friedman ended up overshooting their deadline by three years, losing themselves completely in what turned out to be a mad project, struggling to create something worthy of Ginsberg’s incantatory work.
RTFA. I’d want to see the movie anyway. It’s about an important period of my life. I won’t bore you with the differentiating details.
It’s as relevant today as then. After all, the political dragons haven’t changed. They have as much power over government – how we all get to live and learn – as they ever have.
I attended readings by both Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg in NYC. Powerful, outstanding, challenging to a society constipated with conformity.
Historic Bentley snowflake photos for sale
Ten of the pioneering photos of snowflake crystals US farmer Wilson A Bentley began taking more than a century ago are to be sold in New York.
Bentley (1865-1931) is credited with capturing the first images of single snowflakes on camera. He made thousands of the jewel-like prints, no two alike.
His photomicrography technique involved a microscope and a bellows camera.
He caught pneumonia in a blizzard and died just weeks after the publication of his book Snow Crystals…
The sale of his crystal images is a rare event…Chicago art gallery owner Carl Hammer is selling them along with 16 of Bentley’s winter scenes at an antiques show at New York’s American Folk Art Museum.
“They’re remarkably beautiful,” said Mr Hammer.
Snowflake expert Kenneth G Libbrecht said the photos did not meet modern standards because of the “crude equipment” Bentley used. “But he did it so well that hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years,” Mr Libbrecht added.
Beautiful, beautiful. A man dedicated to nature, recording beauty and light.
