The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
Bush officials lead Iraq business push
Senior Bush administration figures including Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Baghdad, and Jay Garner, the retired general who led reconstruction efforts immediately after the war, are leading a new business push into Iraq.
The two one-time senior officials are among a raft of former US soldiers and diplomats either leveraging their war experience helping foreign companies to enter the Iraqi market or starting businesses there themselves. Mr Khalilzad’s Khalilzad Associates this year set up offices in Baghdad and the northern Kurdish city of Erbil from which it is advising companies wanting to do business in Iraq.
TVNL Comment: Khalilzad can be traced back to PNAC, the neocon killers who brought us the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Paid Lying - What Passes For Major Media Journalism
Overall, NPR represents the same dominant interests as the major commercial media - conservative, pro-business, pro-war, pro-Israel, and very much against the public interest while pretending to support it.
FAIR analyzed PBS's flagship NewsHour guest list and drew similar conclusions. Like NPR, it's ideologically right and usually censors progressive content and public interest programming. In a 1990 NewsHour evaluation, FAIR compared its content to ABC's Nightline and found that it presented "an even narrower segment of the political spectrum." It then conducted an October 2005 - March 2006 analysis of all of its programs, got similar results, and determined that NewHour is even more ideologically right than NPR that tilts far in that direction itself.
Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies
Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It’s a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies — to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That’s a lot of estrogen.
More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it — though not conclusively — to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike. Now it turns out it’s in our food.
Pfizer Broke the Law by Promoting Drugs for Unapproved Uses
Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when lawyers for Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn’t break the law again.
What Loucks, who’s now acting U.S. attorney in Boston, didn’t know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice so-called off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea. On the morning of Sept. 2, 2009, another Pfizer unit, Pharmacia & Upjohn, agreed to plead guilty to the same crime.
Army chief fears backlash for Muslim U.S. soldiers
The U.S. Army's top general expressed concern on Sunday that last week's mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, blamed on a Muslim Army officer, could fuel a backlash in the military against Muslim troops.
General George Casey, U.S. Army chief of staff, cautioned against jumping to conclusions about whether religious beliefs motivated the accused gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim born in the United States of immigrant parents.
On sick list: Elderly and the ill pay more under GOP health care reform bill
Republican leaders are pleased their health reform plan would lower premiums on average up to 10% - and shave $68 billion from the federal deficit.
But the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found an odd feature in the 230-page bill: Coverage would be more expensive for older people and folks who are sick.
The Evil Empire
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that "our" government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none.
Fort Hood shootings: How often do soldiers kill soldiers?
The shootings at the Army's Fort Hood in Texas Thursday were an "isolated incident," according to military officials.
But there have been other attacks by military personnel in recent years – some in the United States, some in the war zone in Iraq – and they happened over a period of sustained combat and multiple deployments when increasing numbers of soldiers are experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and committing suicide.
Page 864 of 1154
