I suppose much of the journo commentariat was born since 2008 and therefore has no memory of TARP, Too Big To Fail, or Jamie Dimon rolling around naked inside a gigantic vat of taxpayer money, so there has been a considerable amount of handwring about how the CCP defiled the purity of the stock market by flinging a trillion or so …
Deirdre Fulton – Experts Warn Climate Change is ‘Changing the Contours’ of World’s Oceans
As climate change continues to put ocean ecosystems and the communities that rely upon them at risk, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week outlined a new “Climate Science Strategy” meant to increase fisheries’ resilience against global warming. “NOAA just announced that for the globe the month of July—and actually, the entire year so far—was the warmest ever recorded, …
NOREEN SADIK – Confiscating lives, one hectare at a time
On 17 August, Issa al-Shatleh, of Beit Jala, Palestine, started his day with news that Israeli soldiers were on the land that had belonged to his family for hundreds of years. When he arrived, he found ‘they were destroying the land, and cutting my ancient olive trees, some hundreds of years old’. ‘They came without a warning,’ he said. And it …
Amy Traub – What If We Achieved Real Equality for Women?
Today marks 95 years since the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, and 44 years since Congress designated its anniversary Women’s Equality Day. This gives us the opportunity to consider how far we’ve come, how far we have to go, and envision what the world would look like if women attained full equality. I …
Tim Radford – Drought as the New Normal for the US West
One way or another, humans are to blame for the catastrophic drought in California that scientists say may be emerging as a “new normal”. Either humans have mismanaged the state’s water, or human-triggered global warming has begun to help turn America’s landscape of wine and roses into a dustbowl, according to two new studies. And the arguments have relevance extending …
Marty Kaplan – Why It’s Getting to Be Damn Near Impossible to Know What Food Is Actually Healthy
You might think an outfit calling itself an academy would be, you know, academic. But as Jon Stewart put it [3], the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is as much an academy as the “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” called Kraft Singles is cheese. The last time the academy was in the news, it was for taking an undisclosed amount of money from …
Dave Lindorff – Why Wall Street Reporting is a Joke
It’s entertaining to watch and to read reports in the corporate media about the current stock market decline, which over the course of the last six business days erased $2.1 trillion in the market value of stocks of publicly-traded US corporations (and in a lot of ordinary Americans’ retirement savings). CNN, in an article on Wednesday, had a piece on …
Jon Queally – As Obama’s War in Iraq and Syria Rumbles On, Are Intel Books Getting Cooked?
Calling to mind the subterfuge made infamous by the administration of George W. Bush in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, reports are emerging from within Obama’s Pentagon and intelligence community that internal assessments of the ongoing war against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria are being “cooked” or “politicized” to fit the public proclamations …
Ramzy Baroud – ‘Islamic State’ Pretence and the Upcoming Wars in Libya
Another war is in the making in Libya: the questions are ‘how’ and ‘when’? While the prospect of another military showdown is unlikely to deliver Libya from its current security upheaval and political conflict, it is likely to change the very nature of conflict in that rich, but divided, Arab country. An important pre-requisite to war is to locate an …
CAREY GILLAM – U.S. regulator sued for withholding information on GMO crops
A food safety advocacy group sued an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday, saying it illegally withheld public information on genetically engineered crops. The lawsuit, brought by the Center for Food Safety (CFS) against the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), claims the regulator has routinely failed to respond as required to requests for records …









