by Brian McFadden for Daily Kos A compendium of comments on the new statin guidelines from Gary Schwitzer at Health News Review: I’d like to see a public survey of comprehension of the recent splash of news about new guidelines for heart disease prevention and statin drug use. Heads must be spinning.Here are some of the pieces…
The scoop on bullet wounds is very simple: fired from a long distance, the bullet enters an object making a small entry wound, usually the size of the bullet, and leaves the object with an exit wound the same size or, usually, larger. From the medical website “Explore Forensics“: Exit wounds – as we have…
From UPI and The Hill: WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 (UPI) — Three U.S. Senate Democrats are sponsoring a measure they say would require greater transparency regarding National Security Agency surveillance. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland introduced the measure as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which the Senate is debating this week, The…
Thanks to NGO Privacy International, we learn that over 300 companies can sell you your own surveillance package, incorporating 97 different technologies. For example: Over the last four years, Privacy International has been gathering information from various sources that details how the sector sells its technologies, what the technologies are capable of and in some…
About 1,000 pages of heavily redacted documents were released Monday night (yesterday) by the Director of National Intelligence. Reporters are still sifting through them. But it is striking that a major finding is that NSA repeatedly overstepped what was legally permissible in its collection of data, and then eventually authorization through FISA would “catch up”…
Albanians celebrate on a monument to the national hero Skanderbeg after Edi Rama rejected the US request to host the chemical weapons. Photo: Arben Celi/Reuters The UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has completed its inspection work in Syria on time, and without any major hitch. All production facilities for chemical weapons have…
New guidelines from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology for the use of statin drugs came out on November 12. This is a very big deal for big Pharma, for doctors and for patients. Health consumers beware! The guidelines may lead to tens of millions of healthy, low-risk people being transformed…
The first legal cases (outside the secret FISA court and post Snowden) questioning the legality of NSA spying come to the forefront next week. See the US News piece here. The first case seeks a broad preliminary injection against “some NSA surveillance programs” and will be heard Monday, Nov 18. It is a class action…
Glenn Greenwald (who left the Guardian to start a new online news service Nov 1) has long had a unique ability to pile on the pithy quotes. This time he outdid himself, simply by quoting from an amazing report written for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) by Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor….
Yes, thanks to a tiny $2.6 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, local Seattle police know everywhere your cell phone, ipad, and laptop have been for quite awhile. There is likely video of you as well. The “mesh network” that the police bought is capable of identifying and storing “the IP address, device…
Buy a plane ticket, and TSA not only searches numerous databases about you, but then can share the information with state, local, foreign governments and may even sell the info to debt collection agencies or ??? Thanks to the NY Times for this important piece: The Transportation Security Administration is expanding its screening of passengers…
Here is today’s NY Times’ update on negotiations between Germany and the US on spying; it appears we have not given Germany much besides a promise to leave Angela’s phone alone… Just as European and American negotiators resumed work on a groundbreaking trade accord meant to tie their two continents closer together, René Obermann, the…
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