It was a three page spread, with a kaleidoscope of licorice, candy corn, sweet tarts and lolly pops in full color… in the special “HEALTH” section of Monday’s LA Times. Part of the headline read: “the sugar high may be a myth.” Ah, you heard it here folks—sugar has no adverse effects on our bodies or moods; that is all in our heads.
There was a quote from a nutritionist backing this up. But most of the science in the article was in direct contradiction to the narrative. A professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School was allowed one quote giving the specific changes to a person’s hormones and mental functioning due to sugar; while lots of ink was given to “early studies” that “searched in vain” for any connection to sugar changing a person’s mood or behavior.
So remember, if your child dips into his/her candy bag at Halloween and starts jumping up and down, giggling and screaming (followed by a sugar crash of possibly crying), moms out there: it’s all a figment of your imagination. Just like PMS.
Crazy but true–some racist with a Tennessee IP address constructed a fake CNN web site, with a fake story about a “radical Hispanic separatist organization” taking responsibility for setting the fires with “Molotov cocktails” because “Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, the Chicanas and Chicanos of Aztlán.” There are fake quotes from Gov. Schwarzenegger, and a fake interview with a fire chief. It even links to the real CNN site for related news. The only thing lacking on the fake site are advertisers.
On Friday, in Paris, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fled a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine through a side door connecting to the U.S. embassy to avoid journalists and human rights attorneys waiting for him outside. Four human rights groups filed charges against Rumsfeld for his role in ordering and authorizing torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. They filed similar charges against Rumsfeld when he was in Germany in 2004.
“Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide,” said the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner. “A torturer is an enemy of all humankind.”
Charges are brought under the 1984 Convention against Torture, ratified by both the United States and France, which has been used in France in previous torture cases.
The human rights organizations say French courts have an obligation under the Convention against Torture to prosecute individuals responsible for acts of torture if they are present on French territory.
Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) have joined forces urging the FCC’s chair Kevin Martin not to approve further media consolidation. Dorgan and Lott pledged to introduce a “resolution of disapproval” — a rarely used legislative veto of bad regulations — if the FCC continued to ignore public input and proceed with consolidation by the end of December.
“If the FCC proceeds on the schedule it is planning, it will be a big mistake,” Dorgan said. “It’s clear the concentration of media ownership that has already taken place has not been good for our country. I’m confident any plan to allow additional concentration of media ownership will be rejected.”
Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that makes California the first state in the union to require all new semiautomatic handguns to come equipped with “microstamping” – when a gun is fired, the shell casing will be stamped with the make, model and serial number of the gun.
This means shell casings can be traced back to the gun’s owner. According to the LA Times, 70% of all new handguns sold in the Golden State are semiautomatic, and 45% of all homicides are left unsolved because of lack of evidence. This bill hopes to close the evidence gap.
One wonders why the gun lobby was so vehemently opposed to this bill. It doesn’t restrict or prevent anyone from buying a gun. The NRA says the bill has “unintended consequences,”like making guns more expensive. That seems like a bs reason. If “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” then, let’s arrest those people, people—not protect the identity of murderers.
Never in the short history of the nuclear age has the military lost track of nuclear missiles—until now. Buried on A23 (with a few scant paragraphs in “Nation in Brief”) of the LA Times on Thursday, it seems a B-52 bomber mistakenly flew from North Dakota to Louisiana with six (6!) nuclear warheads strapped to its wings. Strapped to its wings!
By Saturday, the story moved up to page A10, and had more details: the plane’s crew had no idea that six nuclear warheads were strapped to the wings when they made the flight; the weapons were strapped to the wings on the runway for nearly 24 hours in North Dakota, and no one noticed; Air Force personnel who were assigned to secure the move of non-nuclear missiles didn’t examine the missiles closely enough to realize that they contained nuclear warheads.
The flight occurred on August 29. Although it is military policy never to discuss the movements of the nuclear arsenal, Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne decided to go public at a Pentagon news conference because the accident was so serious. At least five officers have been relieved of command.
Photo of Hiroshima Bomb Damage: it could have happened here.
The University of Chicago Press has reprinted a manual the U.S. War Department handed out to American servicemen posted in Iraq back in 1943. The book seems to have struck a chord with the public. The LA Times reports that it has become a hit seller for the university publisher. That’s because the 64-year-old advice the book gives is shockingly relevant.
“American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis like American soldiers or not,” the book says on it’s opening page. Other tips: always be respectful, and don’t stare at, Iraqi women; don’t be boastful or arrogant; learn some Arabic phrases; remember that Arabs are some of the most relentless guerrilla fighters in the world.
The 44-page book appears just as it did during WWII, with one addition: a forward by Army Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, who served in Iraq in 2003. He writes, in part, that some of the advice given in this book “might have prevented the fervent insurgency from being raised to the fever pitch it has taken recently.”
Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq During World War II is only $10, and can be ordered here.
The FCC wants to let media moguls like Rupert Murdoch own more radio, TV, and newspapers in a single city than ever before. What to do? Have some fun and play Whack-a Murdoch! Then check out what StopBigMedia.com is doing.
In other Murdoch news, CNBC had contracted to run ads on two Dow Jones web sites Monday (Murdoch bought Dow Jones for $5 billion recently). Instead of honoring its contract, Dow Jones pulled the ads and ran ads for Fox Business–a new cable network that launched Monday, and is a direct competitor of CNBC. Is that legal? Read more here.
Meanwhile, big telecommunications giants refused to answer questions from Congress about their cooperation with the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping program. Officials from AT&T, Verizon Communications and Qwest Communications International told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that they would have to ask permission from Bush first.
(Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan, photo by Murad Sezer/Associated Press)
Buried in page A7 of the Saturday LA Times (with the vague headline, “Turkey’s premier issues warning”) Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to protect Turkey from the Kurds in Northern Iraq—and America be dammed.
“Did [the U.S.] seek permission from anyone when they came from a distance of 10,000 kilometers and hit Iraq?” Erdogan asked. “We do not need anyone else’s advice.”
What the papers don’t report in all their hype about “stable” and America-loving Northern Iraq (where the Kurds hope to form Kurdistan) is that Turkey’s been bombing them since 1992 with U.S. permission—or at least a blind-eye, and a wink and a nudge. The “no-fly” zone established after the Gulf War only applied to Saddam Hussein. President Clinton let Turkey fly over and bomb the Kurds regularly during his administration. (In March of 1995, Turkey invaded northern Iraq with 35,000 troops to wage war against the Kurds. They used the ‘no-fly zone’ as a cover to protect their own bombers.) And, Turkey bombed the Kurds just this past summer.
Today, Turkey said that if Congress passes a resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide, then the U.S. can no longer use Turkish air bases to launch attacks against Iraq. If that happens, U.S. planes will have to take off from Italy or some such farther off place, costing considerably more.
Maybe Bush can now blame the Democrats for escalating the war, and the troops can come home?
The League of Conservation Voters has put together environmental profiles on all the candidates running for president in ‘08. In addition to publishing the candidates’ answers to a questionnaire, the LCV grades their voting records for all their years in Congress.
For example, Hilary Clinton had a high score (91) until last year when she started running for president (71). She started voting in favor of the polluters, perhaps for campaign contributions? I don’t know.
Dennis Kucinich has scored a perfect 100 for the past three years.
Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani is a big blank. He has not responded to the questionnaire, and has no environmental score from his time as mayor of New York City.
Not only have the three leading Democratic contenders for the White House refused to commit to withdrawing troops from Iraq by 2013, President Bush said in an interview that he is advising Hillary Clinton’s campaign!
Other Democrats are enabling Bush’s war policies. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi removed from a war spending bill a provision that would require Bush to get Congress’s approval to attack Iran. Instead of doing her job, Pelosi says she prays “all the time” to get Bush to change his policies.
No wonder a new Washington Post ABC poll has the Congressional Democrats polling lower than Bush’s 33%–at 29%!
But public opinion can’t seem to sway the Democrats or the president into doing anything differently.
This was the argument made by The Yes Men when they infiltrated GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held on June 14 in Calgary, Alberta.
Posing as representatives of ExxonMobile and the National Petroleum Council (NPC), the two activists delivered the keynote address at the conference to 20,000 attendees.
The speech focused on current U.S. and Canadian energy policies, specifically the massive, carbon-intensive exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands, and the development of liquid coal, which are increasing the chances of huge global calamities. But the two reassured the audience that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could “keep fuel flowing” by transforming the billions of people who die into oil.
Then they showed a short film in which a former Exxon maintenance man volunteered to turn his body into candles, that were first passed out to the crowd and lit.
The pair was ejected after the film and fined for trespassing.
A transcript of the entire speech was reprinted in this month’s (October’s) Harpers Magazine.
“New documents indicate that there have been a total of 195 shooting incidents involving Blackwater forces since 2005. Blackwater’s contract says the company is hired to provide defensive services. But in most of these incidents, it was Blackwater forces who fired first.
“… The Committee’s investigation raises as many questions about the State Department’s oversight of Blackwater as it does about Blackwater itself. On December 24, 2006, a drunken Blackwater contractor shot the guard of the Iraqi Vice President. This didn’t happen out on a mission protecting diplomats: it occurred inside the protected Green Zone. If this had happened in the United States, the contractor would have been arrested and a criminal investigation launched. If a drunken U.S. soldier had killed an Iraqi guard, the soldier would face a court martial.
“But all that has happened to the Blackwater contractor is that he has lost his job. The State Department advised Blackwater how much to pay the family to make the problem go away and then allowed the contractor to leave Iraq just 36 hours after the shooting. Incredibly, internal e-mails document a debate over the size of the payment. The Charge d’Affairs recommended $250,000 payment, but this was cut to $15,000 because the Diplomatic Security Service said Iraqis would try to get themselves killed for such a large payout.
“It is hard to read these e-mails and not come to the conclusion that the State Department is acting as Blackwater’s enabler.”
The LA Times on Tuesday published a story detailing an investigative memo into past Blackwater misconduct. The memo states Blackwater won $1 billion in no bid contracts from the government between 2001 and 2006 and says “relatives of Blackwater founder [Erik] Prince have been major Republican contributors.” These revelations are in the last two paragraphs of the LA Times story.
Verizon got caught blocking pro-choice text messages on Wednesday. The phone company backpedaled on Thursday and lifted the ban. It was a simple glitch a Verizon spokesman declared, and they felt really, really bad about it.
Today, Verizon is in full damage control, hoping this cloud will blow over in time for its next assault on free speech.
But apologies aren’t cutting it anymore. Verizon’s censorship of the national pro-choice organization NARAL is just the latest example in a laundry list of phone company efforts to block, filter or interfere with the free flow of information on cell phones and the Internet.
It was a three page spread, with a kaleidoscope of licorice, candy corn, sweet tarts and lolly pops in full color… in the special “HEALTH” section of Monday’s LA Times. Part of the headline read: “the sugar high may be a myth.” Ah, you heard it here folks—sugar has no adverse effects on our bodies or moods; that is all in our heads.
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