eeyore's News and View

I'm against anything that brings on a "global economy or government". It is a bane to personal freedom and in my poinion should not be supported.
Leading climate scientist: 'democratic process isn't working'
Protest and direct action could be the only way to tackle soaring carbon emissions, a leading climate scientist has said.
James Hansen, a climate modeller with Nasa, told the Guardian today that corporate lobbying has undermined democratic attempts to curb carbon pollution. "The democratic process doesn't quite seem to be working," he said.
Speaking on the eve of joining a protest against the headquarters of power firm E.ON in Coventry, Hansen said: "The first action that people should take is to use the democratic process. What is frustrating people, me included, is that democratic action affects elections but what we get then from political leaders is greenwash.
"The democratic process is supposed to be one person one vote, but it turns out that money is talking louder than the votes. So, I'm not surprised that people are getting frustrated. I think that peaceful demonstration is not out of order, because we're running out of time."
Hansen said he was taking part in the Coventry demonstration tomorrow because he wants a worldwide moratorium on new coal power stations. E.ON wants to build such a station at Kingsnorth in Kent, an application that energy and the climate change minister Ed Miliband recently delayed. "I think that peaceful actions that attempt to draw society's attention to the issue are not inappropriate," Hansen said.
He added that a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last week had made clear the "urgency of the science and the inaction taken by governments".

Officials will gather in Bonn later this month to continue talks on a new global climate treaty, which campaigners have called to be signed at a UN meeting in Copenhagen in December. Hansen warned that the new treaty is "guaranteed to fail" to bring down emissions.
Hansen said: "What's being talked about for Copenhagen is a strenghening of Kyoto [protocol] approach, a cap and trade with offsets and escape hatches which will be gauranteed to fail in terms of getting the required rapid reduction in emissions. They talk about goals which sound impressive, but when you see the actions are such that it will be impossible to reach those goals, then I can understand the informed public getting frustrated."
He said he was growing "concerned" over the stance taken by the new US adminstration on global warming. "It's not clear what their intentions are yet, but if they are going to support cap and trade then unfortunately i think that will be another case of greenwash. It's going to take stronger action than that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/18/nasa-climate-change-james-hansen

U.S. teen birth rate up again, fewer pre-term babies
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. teen birth rate rose for a second straight year in 2007 after a long decline and more babies were born to all mothers than even at the peak of the baby boom after World War Two, officials said on Wednesday.
In an encouraging development, the rate of premature births and low birthweight babies declined after a long upward trend, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
But Cesarean deliveries rose for an 11th straight year to a new high -- up 2 percent to 31.8 percent of births.
"Every pregnant woman in the U.S. should be alarmed by this rate," Pam Udy, president of the International Cesarean Awareness Network advocacy group, said in a statement. "Half or more of Cesareans are avoidable and over-using major surgery on otherwise healthy women and babies is taking a toll."
A record 39.7 percent of babies in 2007 were born to unmarried women, including 71.6 percent of black babies and 51.3 percent of Hispanic babies, the report found.
The birth rate for teenage girls rose 5 percent between 2005 and 2007, according to the report.
The previously reported increase in 2006 ended 14 straight years of declines. The rate rose again in 2007 by 1 percent over the prior year to 42.5 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19.
Some experts blame the teen birth rate increases on the government's support for "abstinence-only" education under the Bush administration that left office in January, but advocates of that approach have defended it as sound.
"The teen birth rate in the U.S. had declined dramatically in past years because of both less sex and more contraception," Bill Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy advocacy group said in a telephone interview.
"The teen birth rate is now going up probably for the opposite set of reasons -- the combination of more sex and less contraception."
According to the Child Trends nonprofit research group, fewer sexually active high school girls are using contraceptives and fewer U.S. students are getting formal contraceptive education.
"Two years of increases in the teen birth rate are a wake-up call showing the need to target efforts to help teens delay sexual activity, improve contraceptive use, and delay early and generally unplanned childbearing," said Jennifer Manlove of Child Trends.
The total of 4.3 million babies born in 2007 was the most ever recorded in the United States, topping even the peak of the baby boom in 1957, according to the report.
The percentage of babies born prematurely rose by more than a third since the 1980s but dropped by 1 percent in 2007 compared to the previous year.
Premature babies -- defined as born before the 37th week of pregnancy instead of the typical pregnancy of roughly 40 weeks -- are more likely to have medical and developmental problems.
The March of Dimes charity said pre-term birth is the leading cause of newborn deaths in the United States, with early births costing more than $26 billion annually.
For the first time since 1984 there was a drop in the percentage of babies born with low birth weight, which similarly increases the risk of a baby's health problems.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE52H67H20090318

U.S. capital struggles to contain HIV epidemic
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "Who's next for testing?" Nathalie Boittin asked on Tuesday in a crowded waiting room at the Whitman-Walker Clinic in northwest Washington.
A young black man rose and Boittin, a community health educator, led him to get tested for the AIDS virus.
Testing has spiked at this clinic and others in the U.S. capital since an official report this week showed that 3 percent of the city's residents are infected with HIV. Officials believe the true figure is even higher.
"There are a lot of people who don't know they are HIV positive because they don't want to know or are afraid to know," said Edward Harris, a 55-year-old man who gets care at the clinic.
With a large poor and minority population, the District of Columbia has struggled with HIV for decades. Its report on Monday showed the number of people with HIV infections rose 22 percent from 2006 to 2007.
"I think the true prevalence rate could be 30 to 50 percent higher," Dr. Shannon Hader, the city's HIV/AIDS Administration director, said in a telephone interview. Many people are likely infected without knowing it.
The report showed that 6.5 percent of the city's black men were infected. Overall, there were 15,120 HIV-infected people. Blacks make up 53 percent of the population of just over half a million people, but account for 76 percent of infections.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Washington has one of the most severe epidemics in the nation.
"It's an epidemic across all aspects of District life," Whitman-Walker Clinic CEO Donald Blanchon said. "It's not an epidemic of one group. It's not just gay or black."
Blanchon said people are being infected in three different ways, making it harder to target those at highest risk.
While sex between men was the top cause, accounting for 37 percent of cases, heterosexual sex led to 28 percent of cases and injection drug use to 18 percent, according to the report.
Hader said the city is stepping up its efforts. The city said it raised the number of people in its AIDS drug assistance program by 50 percent from 2007 to 2008, while the number of young people getting HIV tests doubled in the same period.
The city said it is one of two in the nation with a major condom distribution program, distributing 1.5 million in 2008.
"We want to make condoms widely available for free at a lot of easy-access points around the city," Hader said, including beauty parlors, barber shops, liquor stores and bars.
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE52G6J620090317

Universal Healh Care, i don't want any part of it
Britain apologises for 'Third World' hospital
The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient's relative to "a Third World" health centre.
Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.
"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.
Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital's accident and emergency department, the report found.
Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.
"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives," said the 47-year-old. "We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.
"There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.
"It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace."
The British premier, who has trumpeted huge increases in spending on the NHS since his Labour party took office in 1997, said there were "no excuses" for what happened to patients at the hospital.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson said: "I apologise on behalf of the government and the NHS, for the pain and anguish caused to so many patients and their families by the appalling standards of care at Stafford Hospital.
"Patients will want to be absolutely certain that the quality of care at Stafford Hospital has been radically transformed, and in particular, that the urgent and emergency care is administered safely," he added.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.09affc88c9815310300a92378aed0564.2f1&show_article=1

ATF takes aim at deep 'Iron river of guns'
Guns recovered in some of the largest recent weapons seizures in Mexico are being traced deep into the United States — miles from the volatile border — revealing an expanding trafficking network that feeds Mexico's violent drug cartels, according to government documents and U.S. investigators.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records show 90% of the weapons recovered and traced originate from a growing number of sources spanning from the Northwest to New England. The trafficking routes have created what Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., described earlier this week as an "iron river of guns" flowing to the warring cartels, contributing to about 7,000 deaths in the past 14 months.

2,000 weapons a day

Some of the strongest recent evidence of the cartels' expanding gun pipeline:

• Four months after the largest weapons seizure in Mexican history, U.S. investigators have traced 383 of the more than 400 weapons seized from a stash house in Reynosa, Mexico, to 11 states including Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Michigan and Connecticut, according to ATF records.
• Nearly a year after a gunbattle left 13 dead in Tijuana, the seizure of 60 guns has prompted probes in Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Denver.
• The guns, many of them high-powered assault rifles, are streaming across the border at such a pace that some are being recovered in Mexico within days after their purchase in the U.S, according to ATF records.
One of the weapons in the Reynosa investigation — a 9mm handgun — was recovered 11 days after its purchase in the Houston area.
"Every time we open one of these cases, we are learning something new," said William Hoover of the ATF. The Reynosa seizure has spawned 25 to 30 ongoing trafficking investigations across the USA, he said.
Escalating violence in the battle to control the lucrative drug trade in Mexico has increased the demand for weapons, while the cost for firearms along the U.S. side of the border has soared, Hoover said. Those market forces drive traffickers far into the interior of the United States in search of new and cheaper supplies of firearms.
Denise Dresser, a political science professor at Mexico's Autonomous Institute of Technology, told a Senate panel Tuesday that up to 2,000 weapons per day flow into Mexico from the United States.
Many of the guns recovered in Mexico also are much more quickly used in crimes than is typical in U.S.-based gun investigations.
In the Reynosa seizure, U.S. investigators are focusing on about 120 weapons in which the time of a gun purchase to the time of recovery in a crime is half of the 10-year U.S. average. This includes newly purchased handguns and assault rifles, Hoover said.
"There is no doubt about it that the (drug-trafficking organizations) need firearms," he said. "Everybody knows the fight is on; everybody knows the pressure is being applied along the border."
Lawmakers join fight
That pressure, the ATF official says, is driving up gun prices in border states.
In Texas, for example, a used .45-caliber handgun may sell for about $750. North of the U.S. border states, Hoover says, the same gun may cost $350.
Within the past six months, Hoover says, a federal investigation revealed that traffickers were paying a flat fee of about $1,000 per gun, regardless of the type, to keep the flow of weapons moving.
Fearing increased spillover violence on the U.S. side of the border, federal lawmakers from border states, including Reps. Ciro Rodriguez, D-Texas, and Harry Teague, D-N.M., on Wednesday introduced legislation that would provide $379 million in law enforcement aid aimed in part at slowing the gun-smuggling trade.
The proposal includes a plan to inspect vehicles traveling into Mexico from the United States.
It also includes $30 million for the ATF to expand its gun-smuggling investigations along the Southwestern border.
"The funding in this bill provides law enforcement with additional resources to aggressively go after the illegal gun smuggling that has fueled much of the violence along the border," Teague says.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-03-18-cartelguns_N.htm