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Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contractors to provide a "Multi-Robot Pursuit System" that will let packs of robots "search for and detect a non-cooperative human". Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons? Or could the packs even be lethally armed? Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University is an expert on police and military technologies. "The giveaway here is the phrase 'a non-cooperative human subject'," he told me: "What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed. We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed." Noel Sharkey, an AI and robotics engineer at the University of Sheffield, says "This is a clear step towards one of the main goals of the US Army's Future Combat Systems project, which aims to make a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack. Independently, ground and aerial robots have been tested together and once the bits are joined, there will be a robot force under command of a single soldier with potentially dire consequences for innocents around the corner."
Note: For many revealing reports of new weaponry technologies in the planning and development stages, click here.
Economic inequality is growing in the world's richest countries, particularly in the United States. The gap between rich and poor has widened over the last 20 years in nearly all the countries studied, even as trade and technological advances have spurred rapid growth in their economies. With job losses and home foreclosures skyrocketing and many of these countries now facing recession, policymakers must act quickly ... the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said. "What will happen if the next decade is not one of world growth but of world recession? If a rising tide didn't lift all boats, how will they be affected by an ebbing tide?" Oxford University economist Anthony Atkinson said at a conference at the organization's Paris headquarters. In a 20-year study of its member countries, the group found inequality had increased in 27 of its 30 members as top earners' incomes soared while others' stagnated. The United States has the highest inequality and poverty rates in the organization after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000, the report said. France, meanwhile, has seen inequalities fall in the past 20 years as poorer workers are better paid. Rising inequality threatens social mobility ... which is lower in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Italy, where inequality is high, than countries with less inequality such as Denmark, Sweden and Australia, the report said. Wealthy households are not only widening the gap with the poor, but in countries such as the United States, Canada and Germany, they are also leaving middle-income earners further behind.
Note: For more reports from reliable sources on increasing income inequality, click here.
Ask nearly any physicist if it’s possible for a hydrogen atom to enter a lower energy state than the ground, or resting, state they hold in nature, and you’re likely to get an unequivocal “no”. But a tiny company in New Jersey called Blacklight Power has been disputing that assumption for over a decade, and of late, making gad-fly claims that its founder says will overturn the accepted scientific order. Blacklight’s claims have a special significance: If they’re true, there’s a source of cheap, clean energy that can be easily tapped anywhere in the world. Blacklight is now saying that it has physical proof of its energy generator, verified by an independent university lab. Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single crackpot; instead, the company employs a good handful of high-level scientists who would presumably rebel if the idea was totally false. It has also taken over $60 million in venture funding. Despite a hearty rejection by the scientific mainstream, and being ignored for years on end, its founder, Randell Mills, has plugged on. Now an engineering team at Rowan University ...has come forward with results from its own tests of the Blacklight process. Tests conducted in sealed chambers, and measured with a device called a calorimeter, show a heat reaction from a substance provided by Blacklight far beyond anything anticipated. “We’ve been able to regularly reproduce these results and we believe any research lab could do the same,” Peter Jansson, the faculty member heading the experiments, [said].
Note: For several videos demonstrating this amazing new energy source, click here. For reports from professors and engineers who have validated this exciting technology, click here.
BlackLight Power, the company that has pulled in $60 million for its seemingly physics-defying fuel cell, is back with an announcement about an independent validation of its technology. A team of engineers, headed by Dr. Peter Jansson at Rowan University, have tested BlackLight’s prototypes and found that the devices perform as BlackLight claims, ambiguously concluding that “there is a novel reaction of some type causing the large exotherm which is consistently produced.” To translate: There’s definitely lots of energy being produced. They’re just not sure why. BlackLight says its technology can push an electron closer to the nucleus by way of a catalytic reaction, resulting in a huge amount of clean energy. The company describes the reaction as “somewhere between a nuclear and a chemical reaction,” but without any of the messy fallout. The team at Rowan tested BlackLight’s 1,000- and 50,000-watt reactors over three months and were able to replicate BlackLight’s energy claims, saying that the energy produced “cannot be explained by other known sources like combustion or nuclear energy.” The company says a complete verification of the whole process will likely happen within a year. BlackLight tells us it is now in the process of licensing its technology to power producers. The company says it has enough capital to get through commercialization and plans to have its reactors in a power plant in the next two years.
Note: For several videos demonstrating this amazing new energy source, click here. For reports from professors and engineers who have validated this exciting technology, click here.
Secretary Paulson [has been] described as playing the role of the Godfather, making the banks [a bailout] offer they could not refuse. But in one important respect, he was more Santa Claus than Vito Corleone: the agreement allowed the banks to continue paying dividends to common shareholders. These dividends, if they are paid at current levels, will redirect more than $25 billion of the $125 billion to shareholders in the next year alone. A significant fraction of [the bailout] money will wind up in shareholders’ pockets — and thus be unavailable to plug the large capital hole on the banks’ balance sheets. The officers and directors of the nine banks will be among the leading beneficiaries of the dividend payout. Their personal take of the dividends will amount to approximately $250 million in the first year. Why would the banks want to maintain large dividend payouts when they’ve had such a hard time borrowing, are starved of cash, and the credit markets believe that they run a significant risk of defaulting? Shouldn’t these distressed banks be marshalling all of the financial resources available to them to ensure their viability? Here’s why: Each dollar paid out as a dividend today is a dollar that cannot be seized by creditors in the event of bankruptcy. For a distressed company, dividends are not in the interest of the enterprise as a whole (shareholders and lenders taken together), but only in the interest of shareholders. They are an attempt by shareholders to beat creditors out the door. The government should close the door by putting an immediate stop to the dividend payouts of any banks receiving direct federal support.
Note: Is the fox guarding the hen house? For many revealing, reliable reports on the banking bailout, click here.
Sorry to pop your bubble folks, but it no longer matters who's president. Why? The real "game changer" already happened. Democracy has been replaced by Wall Street's new "disaster capitalism." That's the big game-changer historians will remember about 2008, masterminded by Wall Street's ultimate "Trojan Horse," Hank Paulson. Congress simply handed over voting power and the keys to trillions in the Treasury to Wall Street's new "Disaster Capitalists" who now control "democracy." We let it happen. In one generation America has been transformed from a democracy into a strange new form of government, "Disaster Capitalism." Three decades of influence peddling in Washington ... accelerated under Reaganomics and went into hyperspeed under Bushonomics, both totally committed to a new disaster capitalism run privately by Wall Street and Corporate America. No-bid contracts in wars and hurricanes. A housing-credit bubble -- while secretly planning for a meltdown. Finally, the coup de grace: Along came the housing-credit crisis, as planned. Press and public saw a negative, a crisis. Disaster capitalists saw a huge opportunity. Yes, opportunity for big bucks and control of America. This end game was planned for years in secret war rooms on Wall Street, in Corporate America, in Washington and the Forbes 400. Naomi Klein summarizes the game in Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This "new economy" generates enormous profits feeding off other peoples' misery: Wars, terror attacks, natural catastrophes, poverty, trade sanctions, subprime housing meltdowns and all kinds of economic, financial and political disasters.
Note: The author of this highly critical commentary, Paul B. Farrell, is a well-known writer on finance and investment and a long-time columnist at The Wall Street Journal's sister-site MarketWatch.
In a step that could accelerate a shakeout of the nation’s banks, the Treasury Department hopes to spur a new round of mergers by steering some of the money in its $250 billion rescue package to banks that are willing to buy weaker rivals, according to government officials. As the Treasury embarks on its unprecedented recapitalization, it is becoming clear that the government wants not only to stabilize the industry, but also to reshape it. Two senior officials said the selection criteria would include banks that need more capital to finance acquisitions. “Treasury doesn’t want to prop up weak banks,” said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the matter. “One purpose of this plan is to drive consolidation.” With bankers traumatized by the credit crisis and the loss of investor confidence, officials said, there are plenty of banks open to selling themselves. The hurdle is a lack of well-capitalized buyers. Stable national players like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are already digesting acquisitions. A second group of so-called super-regional banks are well positioned to take over their competitors, officials said, but have been reluctant to undertake or unable to complete deals. By offering capital at a favorable rate, the government may encourage them to expand.
Note: So the U.S. government is using billions of taxpayer dollars to support megamergers which create less competition and more monopolistic conditions. Hmmmm. Is that what the taxpayers really want? For lots more highly revealing reports on the Wall Street bailout, click here.
Nick Pope worked for Britain's ministry of defense - his job to investigate UFOs sightings. There are some cases, ... about 5 percent, that can't be explained. They are genuine unknowns. 11,000 UFO sightings have been reported in Britian since 1959. Only now are the details being revealed. Lieutenant Milton Torres was ordered to keep silent about what happened. [On] May 20, 1957, he scrambled his sabre jet from a base in England with orders to arm all weapons and fire on sight. Before he could fire, the erratic bright blip on his radar simply disappeared. Any day now, the most contentious file of them all will be opened, the file on Rendlesham Forest, Britain's equivalent of Roswell. POPE: "I have no explanation for the Rendlesham Forest incident." It was Christmas night 1980. Guards at two US Air Force bases in eastern England thought they saw a plane crash in these woods. They investigated and reported a strange glowing object, metallic in appearance. It illuminated the entire forest. The object was hovering or on legs. Two nights later the lights returned. Lt. Col. Charles Halt recorded this as he walked through the dark forest: "Weird. It is coming this way. It is definitely coming this way. This is wierd. There's something very, very strange." Halt's men recorded high radiation levels here at the alleged landing site. The official agenda is ... that gradual disclosure has to be the way. When we're deemed ready to handle the unsettling truth of aliens among us, then all will be revealed.
Note: Don't miss this fascinating five-minute video clip at the link above. To see the video without commercials, click here. For an excellent website on the Rendlesham Forest incident, click here.
The order came straight out of the Cold War manual: "Arm all weapons and fire on sight." For Lieutenant Milton Torres, an American jet fighter pilot based in Britain, it was the first and last time that he had received such a chilling instruction. As soon as he scrambled his Sabre jet from RAF Manston in Kent and headed eastwards, he saw the blip on his radar, indicating the presence of an aircraft the size of a B52 about 15 miles away, and he prepared to close in for the kill with a salvo of rockets. But the "aircraft", judged to be hostile and probably Russian, simply vanished. The blip on the radar disappeared. The 24-year-old American pilot's extraordinary experience on the night of May 20, 1957, which he was officially ordered never to reveal to anyone, has come to light after the declassification of another batch of Ministry of Defence files relating to reported incidents of unidentified flying objects appearing in British airspace – in this case the only known example of a jet fighter pilot being ordered to shoot down a UFO. Mr Torres, now 77 and a retired professor of civil engineering living in Miami, told The Times that the day after he was scrambled from RAF Manston he received a visit from an American in a trenchcoat who waved a National Security Agency identity card at him and warned him that, if he ever revealed what had happened, he would never fly again. He took the warning to heart and said nothing until 1988 when, through a solicitor with an interest in ufology, he sent the Ministry of Defence a report giving a full account of the incident. Today his narrative is released by the National Archives.
Note: For a highly revealing summary of key evidence for UFOs presented by respected military and government officials, click here.
Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions. "Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers. "Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna need help. He's gonna need you ... to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially ... that we're right. Gird your loins," Biden told the crowd. "We're gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. The next president is gonna be left with the most significant task. It's like cleaning the Augean stables, man. He's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, 'Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?' We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now ... [to] be prepared to stick with us. There are gonna be a lot of you who want to go, 'Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision'," Biden continued. "Because if you think the decision is sound when they're made, which I believe you will, they're not likely to be as popular as they are sound. Because if they're popular, they're probably not sound."
Note: This remarkable warning from Joe Biden of a near-term "generated crisis" is notable as well for its anti-democratic sentiments. Gen. Colin Powell, in endorsing Barack Obama for president on "Meet the Press" on Oct. 19 (the same day as Biden's speech), also said "there's going to be a crisis come along [on] the 21st or 22nd of January that we don't even know about right now." Beyond the timing, what do these key insiders know that the public doesn't? And what country has the demonstrated capability to "generate" a crisis at will?
Climate change is happening much faster than the world's best scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a global scale, a new report warns. 'Extreme weather events' such as the hot summer of 2003, which caused an extra 35,000 deaths across southern Europe from heat stress and poor air quality, will happen more frequently. Britain and the North Sea area will be hit more often by violent cyclones and the predicted rise in sea level will double to more than a metre, putting vast coastal areas at risk from flooding. The bleak report from WWF -- formerly the World Wildlife Fund -- also predicts crops failures and the collapse of ecosystems on both land and sea. And it calls on the EU to set an example to the rest of the world by agreeing a package of challenging targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to tackle the consequences of climate change and to keep any increase in global temperatures below 2C. The agency says that the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ... is now out of date. WWF's report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC's forecasts. As an example it says the first 'tipping point' may have already been reached in the Arctic, where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years - something that hasn't occurred for a million years. It could result in rapid and abrupt climate change rather than the gradual changes forecast by the IPCC.
Note: For lots more on global warming from major media sources, click here.
Interpol is planning to expand its role into the mass screening of passengers moving around the world by creating a face recognition database. Every year more than 800 million international travellers fail to undergo "the most basic scrutiny" to check whether their identity documents have been stolen, the global policing cooperation body has warned. Senior figures want a system that lets immigration officials capture digital images of passengers and immediately cross-check them against a database of pictures of [alleged] terror suspects, international criminals and fugitives. The UK's first automated face recognition gates -- matching passengers to their digital image in the latest generation of passports -- began operating at Manchester airport in August. Mark Branchflower, head of Interpol's fingerprint unit, will this week unveil proposals in London for the creation of biometric identification systems that could be linked to such immigration checks. The civil liberties group No2ID, which campaigns against identity cards, expressed alarm at the plans. "This is a move away from seeking specific persons to GCHQ-style bulk interception of information," warned spokesman Michael Parker. "This is the next step. Law enforcement agencies want the most efficient systems but there has to be a balance between security and privacy."
Note: For many disturbing reports on increasing threats to privacy, click here.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials. The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. The cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes. So depleted are the ranks of the F.B.I.’s white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau’s attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars. Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism. According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.
Note: How fortunate for the financial fraudsters that the FBI doesn't have the resources to investigate them! Was it just a coincidence that first the "war on terror" and then the Wall Street bailout both have resulted in trillions of dollars going to a few well-positioned corporations? For more on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.
They do not seem the most likely classical music patrons: Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But together, these defense contractors are donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the symphony orchestra in Johnstown, Pa., underwriting performances of Mozart and Wagner in this struggling former steel town. A defense lobbying firm, the PMA Group, even sprang for a champagne reception at the symphony’s opera festival last month. Company representatives say they are being generous corporate citizens. But the orchestra is also a beloved charity of Representative John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, whose Congressional committee hands out lucrative defense contracts, and whose wife, Joyce, is a major booster of the symphony. For the first time, corporations and their lobbyists are being required to disclose donations they make to the favorite causes of House and Senate members, and a review of thousands of pages of records shows the extent — and lavishness — of this once hidden practice. During the first six months of 2008, lobbyists, corporations and interest groups gave approximately $13 million to charities and nonprofit organizations in honor of more than 200 members of the House and Senate. The donations came from firms with numerous interests before the Congress, such as Wal-Mart, the Ford Motor Company, Kraft Foods and Pfizer, and were received by charities ... as well as local groups controlled by members of Congress or those close to them.
Note: For revelations of corporate corruption from major media sources, click here.
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society. A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say. The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details. The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals ... because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private. The move aims to close a loophole in plans being drawn up by GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, to create a huge database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain.
Note: For many disturbing reports on increasing threats to privacy, click here.
"Nothing," [famed economist] Anna Schwartz says, "seems to have quieted the fears of either the investors in the securities markets or the lenders and would-be borrowers in the credit market." The credit markets remain frozen, the stock market continues to get hammered, and deep recession now seems a certainty -- if not a reality already. [Recently, according to Schwarz, Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson has] shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down." Rather, "firms that made wrong decisions should fail," she says bluntly. "You shouldn't rescue them. Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich." How did we get into this mess in the first place? As in the 1920s, the current "disturbance" started with a "mania." But manias always have a cause. "In every case, it was expansive monetary policy that generated the boom in an asset. The particular asset varied from one boom to another. But the basic underlying propagator was too-easy monetary policy and too-low interest ratest. And then of course if monetary policy tightens, the boom collapses." Today's crisis isn't a replay of the problem in the 1930s, but our central bankers have responded by using the tools they should have used then. They are fighting the last war. The result, she argues, has been failure.
Note: Anna Schwarz and Nobel-winner Milton Friedman authored A Monetary History of the United States. It's the definitive account of how misguided monetary policy turned the stock-market crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. The excellent article above mentions that Fed Reserve Chairman Bernanke once said "I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. We won't do it again." Top bankers and their cronies have been aware of what causes the boom/bust cycle for over 100 years and taken full advantage of it. Try to find one top banker who lost significant money in any bust cycle.
Civil liberties groups started a legal challenge ... to the new federal law designed to dismiss their wiretapping suits against telecommunications companies, saying the statute violates phone customers' constitutional rights and tramples on judicial authority. The law ... granted retroactive protection to AT&T, Verizon and other companies against lawsuits accusing them of illegally sharing their telephone and e-mail networks and millions of customer records with the National Security Agency. Almost 40 such suits from around the nation are pending before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco. The law requires him to dismiss the cases if the Justice Department tells him the companies had cooperated in a surveillance program authorized by President Bush. Details of the department's filing and the judge's dismissal order are to be kept secret. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation attacked the secrecy requirements and argued that Congress and President Bush lack authority to order courts to whitewash constitutional violations. "If Congress can give the executive the power to exclude the judiciary from considering the constitutional claims of millions of Americans ... then the judiciary will no longer be functioning as a coequal branch of government," Cindy Cohn, the foundation's legal director, said in court papers. She said the law's secrecy makes the proceedings one-sided. "Due process requires more than the chance to shadow-box with the government," Cohn wrote.
Note: For many reports from reliable, verifiable sources on threats to civil liberties, click here.
All of the combined profits that major banks earned in recent years have vanished. Since mid-2007, when the credit crisis erupted, the country’s nine largest banks have written down the value of their troubled assets by a combined $323 billion. The problems that began with home mortgages, analysts say, are migrating to auto, credit card and commercial real estate loans. The deepening red ink underscores a crucial question about the government’s plan: Will lenders deploy their new-found capital quickly, as the Treasury hopes, and unlock the flow of credit through the economy? Or will they hoard the money to protect themselves? John A. Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, said on Thursday that banks were unlikely to act swiftly. “We will have the opportunity to redeploy that,” Mr. Thain said of the new capital. “But at least for the next quarter, it’s just going to be a cushion." For every dollar the banks earned during the industry’s most prosperous years, they have now wiped out $1.06. [Treasury Secretary Henry M.] Paulson unveiled plans to provide $125 billion to nine banks on terms that were more favorable than they would have received in the marketplace. The government, however, has offered no written requirements about how or when the banks must use the money. “There is no express statutory requirement that says you must make this amount of loans,” said John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency. The banks could use the money from the government for any number of things. Some analysts say the banks may use it to acquire weaker competitors. Others say they might use it to avoid painful cost-cutting. And still others say the banks may sit on the capital.
Note: With no requirements placed on how the bailout money is to be used, what is to stop the banks from using taxpayers's money to inflate the bonuses to top executives, or to increase political campaign contributions to Congress members in return for future favorable legislation?
After a century of declines, the U.S. infant mortality rate barely budged between 2000 and 2005, causing the United States to slip further behind other developed countries despite spending more on healthcare, according to a report released Wednesday. The rate was 6.86 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005, virtually unchanged from 6.89 in 2000. In 1900, the rate was 100 deaths per 1,000 live births. The United States dropped to 29th in the world in infant mortality in 2004, the latest year for which data are available from all countries, tying with Poland and Slovakia. The year before, it was 27th. In 1960, it was 12th. The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed the leveling off in mortality to a 9% increase in premature births over the same period and to stalled progress in saving the earliest preterm infants. Premature birth and low birth weight are by far the biggest causes of infant death. Infant mortality rates vary by race and ethnicity, from a high of 13.63 per 1,000 births for African American women to a low of 4.42 for Cuban Americans, according to the CDC report. Differences in socioeconomic status and access to medical care did not entirely explain the gap, the report said. Premature births are increasing, possibly tied to rising rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension. What those conditions have in common is that they are preventable, and that ... is where the United States falls behind other developed countries.
Note: For a treasure trove of reports on health issues from reliable sources click here.
Consumption of resources is rising rapidly, biodiversity is plummeting and just about every measure shows humans affecting Earth on a vast scale. Most of us accept the need for a more sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency. But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy. This, of course, is economic heresy. Growth to most economists is as essential as the air we breathe. They see no limits to that growth, ever. In recent weeks it has become clear just how terrified governments are of anything that threatens growth, as they pour billions of public money into a failing financial system. Amid the confusion, any challenge to the growth dogma needs to be looked at very carefully. This one is built on a long-standing question: how do we square Earth's finite resources with the fact that as the economy grows, the amount of natural resources needed to sustain that activity must grow too? It has taken all of human history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form it will take just two decades to double. In this special issue, New Scientist brings together key thinkers from politics, economics and philosophy who profoundly disagree with the growth dogma but agree with the scientists monitoring our fragile biosphere.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.