Ebola is killing 60-70% of those affected, even with treatment.  Manufacturers say it will take quite a while to produce sufficient supplies of a vaccine, and that bulk manufacturing will only begin after one of several vaccine candidates is chosen. This makes no sense. The US government spent $440 million to help 3 companies develop…

On Sept 30 I wrote a blog post about how CDC’s Director Frieden was wrong to claim that any US hospital could manage an Ebola patient.  Circumstances sadly proved me right in the case of Dallas, Texas.  Has that changed now that we have had more time to prepare? After the death of Thomas Eric…

This article discusses literally a couple dozen vaccines and drugs that are in development for Ebola.  How is their testing being fast-tracked ? BioDrugs. 2013 Dec;27(6):565-83. doi: 10.1007/s40259-013-0046-1. Choi JH1, Croyle MA. Author information Abstract Ebola is a highly virulent pathogen causing severe hemorrhagic fever with a high case fatality rate in humans and non-human primates (NHPs)….

J Appl Microbiol. 2010 Nov;109(5):1531-9. The survival of filoviruses (Ebola and Marburg) in liquids, on solid substrates and in a dynamic aerosol Piercy TJ1, Smither SJ, Steward JA, Eastaugh L, Lever MS. Author information Abstract AIMS: Filoviruses are associated with high morbidity and lethality rates in humans, are capable of human-to-human transmission, via infected material such as blood, and are…

CDC issued a new poster Friday night October 24, which admits Ebola may in fact be airborne. But CDC says it doesn’t travel farther than 3 feet.  Well, at least CDC is starting to move the narrative.  Maybe tomorrow it will be 5 feet.  Then 10.  Maybe next month they will tell us why all…

The following paper was written by CDC scientists in 1999. J Infect Dis. 1999 Feb;179 Suppl 1:S92-7.  Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1995: risk factors for patients without a reported exposure.  Roels TH1, Bloom AS, Buffington J, Muhungu GL, Mac Kenzie WR, Khan AS, Ndambi R, Noah DL, Rolka HR, Peters CJ, Ksiazek TG. Author information Abstract In 1995, 316 people became…

A quarantine will help stop cases appearing in the US in the near-term, but may mean that fewer medical professionals will volunteer to work in Africa, making control of Africa’s epidemic harder, thus making things worse for the US in the long-term.  (Only 0.5% of MSF staff or less have developed Ebola.) From today’s WaPO:…

Ebola is a designated BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4) virus.  It requires the maximal level of containment possible.  [Anthrax, by the way, is less dangerous, requiring less containment (BSL-3) than Ebola.]  Ebola’s mortality rate is the highest I know of, for any infectious disease. CDC acknowledges (below, in a 2009 publication on page 45) that Ebola requires…

From CBS: But unfortunately, Ebola survivors do often develop certain chronic inflammatory conditions that affect the joints and eyes, problems that can follow a survivor through the remainder of their life. Dr. Amar Safdar, associate professor of infectious diseases and immunology at NYU Langone Medical Center, told CBS News these chronic conditions are a result…

When did pharmaceutical manufacturers demand to be indemnified by governments, when previously asked to produce vaccines? First time:  1976 swine flu.  One soldier died of swine flu at Fort Dix, the virus never did spread through the US population, but 45 million Americans were vaccinated with an unecessary vaccine, several hundred developed Guillain Barre syndrome…

Not sure why this is still a subject for debate.  Animal models establish that Ebola can be transmitted via aerosol secretions under lab conditions.  The question remaining is how often this happens in humans. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. Despite CDC protestations regarding airborne spread, the new guidelines for personal protective equipment issued by…

Below are excerpts from a longer discussion here.  As one of the main providers of Ebola treatment in West Africa, MSF has chosen to take an active role in trialling experimental treatments. We add value to the trial process as we have access to large numbers of patients and therefore potential recipients of the experimental…

I read the full text but can’t post it due to copyright.  The first review is from U Texas.  BioDrugs. 2013 Dec;27(6):565-83. doi: 10.1007/s40259-013-0046-1. Emerging Targets and Novel Approaches to Ebola Virus Prophylaxis and Treatment Choi JH1, Croyle MA. Abstract Ebola is a highly virulent pathogen causing severe hemorrhagic fever with a high case fatality rate in humans…

Here are CDC’s definitions for the different modes of spread of infectious agents.  Scroll down to IB3b and c and you will see that CDC has defined droplet transmission as a form of contact transmission. This may be CDC’s technical justification for insisting that Ebola does not spread via the airborne route, when there is ample evidence…

The West Africa Ebola mortality rate with treatment is very high. Normally, mortality drops when doctors gain experience with new diseases and learn how best to care for patients. This seems not to be the case with this Ebola. West African Ebola may be spreading more easily than other Ebola outbreaks.  [Thanks to Washington’s Blog…

From NBC news today:   A helicopter landed aboard a cruise ship Saturday to pick up a blood sample from a passenger who may have handled fluids from an Ebola patient, ahead of the Carnival Magic’s planned docking at Galveston, Texas, Sunday. Carnival said Texas health officials requested that a sample be taken from the…

Here is a book compiled by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in 2008 to explain the clinical care of Ebola and other filovirus patients:

Because there is so much confusion about the issue of airborne spread of Ebola, this article should clarify the fact that our premier biodefense lab clearly shows that transmission through air may cause infection.  The article is titled, “Development of a Murine (mouse) Model for Aerosolized Ebolavirus Infection Using a Panel of Recombinant Inbred Mice.”…

My thoughts on handling Ebola, which garnered so much interest that I have expanded the original ideas, including updates and links: 1. Personal Protective Equipment Even the best containment gear, combined with a diluted bleach solution to spray down workers as layers are removed, and a buddy system that requires another healthcare professional to watch…

I will post this article in its entirety, but will put the most interesting bits in red so readers can skim the piece for these if they wish–Meryl COMMENTARY: Health workers need optimal respiratory protection for Ebola cidrap.umn.edu /news-perspective/2014/09/commentary-health-workers-need-optimal-respiratory- protection-ebola Lisa M Brosseau, ScD, and Rachael Jones, PhD | Sep 17, 2014 Editor’s Note: Today’s…

Have you ever been face to face with a doctor dressed in rubber boots, a rubber suit, 2-3 pairs of gloves, 2 pairs of goggles and a hood?  I haven’t.  Doctor journalist Richard Besser described the get-up he had to wear in an Ebola ward in Liberia.  I would faint if I had to wear all…

Distinguishing Ebola cases from others is the most immediate need for health care providers and patients.  If you cannot determine immediately who is infected, patients with other conditions will be lumped with possible Ebola patients, and may contract Ebola as a result of healthcare! Even worse (from the point of view of medical providers) is…

If you were ever my patient and asked about artificial sweeteners, you would have gotten an earful. There is so much available data on the problems with them.   And the study referenced here suggests artificial sweeteners actually cause the problem that are supposed to be helping to prevent or ameliorate:  glucose intolerance. From today’s…

Where can you find hundreds of doctors who can leave their practices and deploy to Africa?  In Cuba, where they have deployed large numbers of doctors to Africa many times before.   Cuba has a higher doctor-patient ratio than the US. Cuba uses American medical textbooks to train its doctors and has a very high…

IMHO, many cases and deaths have not been included in these numbers because they occurred in areas without the infrastructure to count them, or were hidden.  Still the rate of increase in cases is chilling and tells me we have likely lost the battle to contain this epidemic.  From the BBC:Cumulative deaths – up to…

I anticipate a huge loss of life from Ebola in Africa, due to the lack of medical and all other infrastructure in so much of the continent. Africans are like everyone else:  they want to save their family members.  If treatment centers are available that will increase the chance of survival, they will utilize them….

Just in case you thought that CDC and federal regulators had things under control regarding research on microorganisms that can be used in bioterrorism, think again.  There were an average of 4 reported escapes each week over the 5 years that ended with 2012. From USA Today, “The only thing unusual about the CDC’s recent…

I noticed that 2 old posts of mine about the laws and regulations governing public health emergencies were getting a lot of attention this week.  I thought I would post them again, as they may soon be relevant here, and are already relevant to Africans faced with quarantines, cordon sanitaires and other legal and physical…

Virus Res. 2014 Jun 12;189C:254-261. doi: 10.1016/j.virusres.2014.06.001.  A highly immunogenic fragment derived from Zaire Ebola virus glycoprotein elicits effective neutralizing antibody.  Wang Y1, Liu Z1, Dai Q2. In order to produce polyvalent vaccines based on single rVSV vector, we investigated the immunogenicity, antibody neutralizing activity, and antigenic determinant domain of Zaire Ebola‘s fragment MFL (aa 393-556) that contains furin…

According to the NYT, there are “243,000 international travelers to United States airports each day… including an average of 679 from Nigeria and 145 from the other three countries, (Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone) according to the C.D.C.”

This is the site where you will get up to date information on the Ebola outbreak from MSF, which is providing the most detailed information from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Despite an estimated 69% death rate, Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders or MSF) doctors and nurses have not come down with the disease.  MSF has 676 staffers working on the ground in Africa.  CDC has 31 to help with case-finding, but none treating victims.  WHO says it has 141 people in West Africa sent…

Go to: ABSTRACT This 2008 article (available free in full text here) described a very promising Ebola vaccine from USAMRIID: Clin Vaccine Immunol. Mar 2008; 15(3): 460–467. Published online Jan 23, 2008. doi:  10.1128/CVI.00431-07 Vaccine to Confer to Nonhuman Primates Complete Protection Against Multistrain Ebola and Marburg Virus Infection Dana L. Swenson,1 Danher Wang,2 Min Luo,2 Kelly L. Warfield,1 Jan Woraratanadharm,2 David…

Since Ebola first was identified in 1976, there have been at least a dozen outbreaks and at least 5 strains have been identified. Serologic tests for Ebola have been available since 1977. The US did not ignore Ebola.  It posed a threat as a natural illness, and posed a different threat as a potential biological…

From USAT: … CDC has not responded to USA TODAY’s requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, filed in June 2012, for records involving lab safety and security incidents at the lab complex. The latest set of “restricted” inspector general audits covered six federal entities conducting research on potential bioterror germs. Additional audits looked at…

I am posting the entire Reuters story below. Is it funny, pathetic, or both? CDC Director Tom Frieden promised Congress to appoint a senior official to oversee lab security in a 2012 letter responding to a Congressional inquiry. Asked about this person at the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Hearing on Wednesday (at…

Not to put too fine a point on it, but today’s Reuters story has even more bad news on safety at our highest containment labs: According to a 2012 report by CDC scientists, there were 16 incidents of lost or escaped microbes from select-agent labs in 2004, meaning everything from misplaced samples to an infected…

The WaPo has published the full text of the CDC report on its anthrax mishap last month, with mention of a number of other, almost identical mishaps…one even from the same lab… in which highly virulent, live bacteria, including anthrax, H5N1 avian flu and Clostridium botulinum were transferred to other labs, on the assumption they were benign…

Latest update claimed that CDC scientists put anthrax into a chemical bath to inactivate it for 24 hours, but after only ten minutes took out a sample for plating and culturing to determine if viable spores remained.  They failed to plate the anthrax that was transferred, after 24 hours in a chemical bath. And it…

In light of the Eric Cantor defeat in Virginia’s Republican primary, that fact that more Nevada voters cast votes for a “None of the Above” option than for a candidate is interesting.  Voters are fed up in both the east and west.  From the Washington Post blog: “And the winner is — no one. More…

A WaPo Saturday article, based on a detailed report by the company Vodaphone, details how many other countries do exactly what the US government does with digital data, including the content of phone calls: scoop up everything they want: …In the Czech Republic, for example, the government compelled Vodafone to turn over the content of…

From David Willman at the LA Times: WASHINGTON — Amid concerns about its effectiveness and multibillion-dollar cost, the Department of Homeland Security has canceled plans to install an automated technology that was meant to speed the 24-hour operations of BioWatch, the national system for detecting a biological attack. The cancellation of the “Generation 3” acquisition was made…

What is the tag line?  Don’t be poor in America.  Healthcare is simply too expensive for a sizable number of Americans to afford, so they go without.  And this is the result.  True, there are more high-risk pregnancies in the US than there used to be, but that is equally true for other developed countries….

The Electronic Medical Record has a new application: to sell more vaccines. The following article comes verbatim from FierceVaccines, while a link to Forbes tells the same story, although its slant emphasizes improvements in health outcomes, rather than Merck profits. Merck has partnered with a cloud-based electronics medical record company to gain information on patients who…

How did Professor Haigwood come to make the case against Ivins?  It appears that (like Jean Duley, Ivins’ trainee therapist who was under house arrest when she was brought by FBI to obtain a restraining order against Ivins, then was trotted out for all major media by the FBI before she went into hiding) Haigwood too received…

Why is the country practically bankrupt and mired in corruption? Can the parts of our economic culture that enable huge government giveaways be identified? We certainly don’t know about how most decisions are made at the federal level, nor do we have any idea how much money changes hands and how.  But there are some…

Seymour Hersh provides a very plausible deconstruction of how chemical weapons were used in an attempt to draw the United States into military engagement with Syria last year—by the Turkish government in cahoots with anti-Assad Syrian rebels. Hopefully you have heard about the leaked YouTube audiotape in which planning for a Syria false flag attack is…

Wondering which corporations feed at the anthrax biodefense rice bowl?  For a minimum of $995 (US) you can find out about where the anthrax money is being spent and who’s doing what. Yet the biggest feeder (Emergent BioSolutions) is missing from the list. So is Pharmathene, which was perhaps Emergent’s biggest competitor, and which just…

This is a very long piece, but it needs to be said and all the points are important.  The US’ record on Human Rights is pitiful, and our commitment to our international  obligations doubly so.  From Truthout: (Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t) While President Obama told the country to…

The Senate committee votes whether to declassify on April 3.  Give the committee members your opinion. Maine’s Senators Collins and King will vote to declassify.  Here is WaPo’s: AT THE heart of the dispute between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency is a document known as the CIA’s internal review. This is…

Behind dysfunctional government, is democracy itself in decay? It took only 250 years for democracy to disintegrate in ancient Athens. A wholly new form of government was invented there in which the people ruled themselves. That constitution proved marvelously effective. Athens grew in wealth and capacity, saw off the Persian challenge, established itself as the…

1.  How widely was Pandemrix vaccine used? Virtually all the narcolepsy data comes from Europe, where the GlaxoSmithKline Pandemrix swine flu vaccine was given to about 31 million Europeans and was used in 47 countries.  It was used in Canada (12 million doses) and a number of developing countries, but little is known about increased cases…

Here we go again.   Twenty-five years ago, the US intelligence community did not know that the USSR was about to fall.  Since then, many hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by the intelligence agencies, but they still missed the boat on the invasion of Crimea–a subject that should have been of utmost…

Thanks to DS Wright at FireDogLake for this article with useful links.  Don’t miss Scott Shane’s Baltimore Sun piece of how intelligence agency trainees listened in to phone conversations by tapping microwave towers, as part of their training–in 1995! During the drama over the so-called Amash Amendment General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, went to Capitol…

And now from the Snowden cache is the story of how it ain’t only the metadata that is vacuumed up by NSA and saved for posterity. No, it is the complete audio recording of calls that is being obtained and stored.  The program allegedly began in 2009, but according to the WaPo, calls are only…

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20140307IPR38203/html/US-NSA-stop-mass-surveillance-now-or-face-consequences-MEPs-say Parliament’s consent to the EU-US trade deal “could be endangered” if blanket mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) does not stop, MEPs said on Wednesday, in a resolution wrapping up their six-month inquiry into US mass surveillance schemes. The text also calls on the EU to suspend its bank data deal…

Maine Voices: Maine senators should abide by Constitution, OK release of torture report They should also place the full force of their offices behind a return to constitutional government. By Meryl Nass  Special to the Press Herald ELLSWORTH — On one historic day 225 years ago, on March 4, 1789, the first U.S. Congress met…

The Washington Post  claimed last week: ‘Swine flu’ strain returns; dramatic rise in deaths of young adults, children.  But CDC does not collect info on young adult deaths.  It does collect info on child deaths, however.  And it collects data on hospitalizations. It is actually the 50-64 year olds who are suffering more hospitalizations this…

This article is also based on documents from the Guardian’s Snowden cache. How can people believe that NSA, GCHQ and their ilk are not storing all phone calls (full audio files, not just metadata) when it takes so much more storage to college webcam information? Let’s get real.  Every digital signature you have left during…

From ABC News in NYC: The outbreak of the mumps at Fordham University has spread from one campus to another. There are now 13 reported cases, 12 at the Rose Hill campus in the Bronx and one at the Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan.  The symptoms are similar to the flu, but the virus can…

Alexander Lebedev penned the following NY Times Opinion piece.  He is “a businessman and former senior officer in the K.G.B., is an owner of the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and publisher of The London Evening Standard and The Independent” according to the Times. He suggests that $30 trillion (yes, with a T) has been embezzled worldwide…

CDC notes the following, where P stands for pneumonia and I stands for influenza: Among 14,628 P&I deaths reported through the 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System from September 29, 2013 to February 8, 2014, a total of 571 (3.9%) were influenza-associated (i.e., they had influenza listed on the death certificate as an underlying or contributing…

Whistleblowers have some protections under US law.  In fact, those who report on corruption that costs the government money are entitled to a large chunk of what $ is recovered as a result of their whistle-blowing.  This often results in multimillion dollar payouts from what are termed “qui tam” or False Claims Act lawsuits. But…

Today’s Washington Post headline reads “‘Swine flu’ strain returns; dramatic rise in deaths of young adults, children.” But the data do not bear this out. Swine flu isn’t really “back”– since 2009, it never left, but there are more cases this year than the last two, relative to other flu strains.  After the 2009-10 swine…

David Kelly was the UK WMD expert and weapons inspector who was found “dead in the woods” in 2003 after he told a BBC reporter that the Blair government memo on WMD did not conform to the facts, and specifically that Saddam could not hit the UK with a nuke in 45 minutes.  This undermined…

The UK Guardian published the following chart in October 2012.  PPP stands for purchasing power parity, or how much the minimum wage is able to buy in its country.  In terms of PPP, we are still beaten by every nation with a higher minimum wage, except Japan.  So we cannot say the US’ low minimum…

The World Press Freedom Index is issued yearly by international NGO Reporters Without Borders. The methodology for ranking nations is described here. 180 nations are included.  At #46, the US is assessed as having less freedom of the press than Papua-New Guinea, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, and South Africa, to pick a few. However, we did beat…

I gave a “super-easy” cooking class this morning.  Why is a doctor giving cooking classes?  Because the quality of the ingredients in processed food is so poor, I believe it is ushering in an age of chronic ill health.  At least when you cook from basic ingredients, you know what they are.  I may have…

It is great to have this long-awaited EU report on corruption make the news around the world. Yes, corruption is now visible almost everywhere, from petty officials demanding bribes from anyone to the awarding of major government contracts.  We knew that.  Now this is an estimate of size.  However, when you estimate the magnitude of…

From the Atlantic:  … the GOP establishment is changing along with its elected officials; the RNC voted in a winter meeting to literally renounce NSA domestic surveillance. “It was passed by a voice vote as part of a package of RNC proposals,” Benjy Sarlin reports. “Not a single member rose to object or call for further debate,…

A second official advisory panel tells the government its NSA bulk collection of data is illegal and furthermore, has shown no benefit in fighting terrorism.  From NBC: A government advisory panel said Thursday that the bulk data collection program run by the National Security Agency is illegal and should be halted.   Recommendations by the…

CDC just published new guidelines for treatment of anthrax exposure and anthrax disease in pregnancy and the postpartum period.  It is said the guidelines are based on meetings  “of national subject matter experts to review key clinical elements of anthrax prevention and treatment for pregnant, postpartum, and lactating (P/PP/L) women.” A lot of effort was made…

I previously quoted former NSA official Russell Tice regarding NSA surveillance. The website WhoWhatWhy has posted a transcript (and video) of Mr. Tice’s July 10, 2013 interview on RT, and it contains some interesting tidbits. Of course, with respect to NSA surveillance, the big question is who gets and uses the information; who is running…

So much for keeping your computer safe from spying–or even insertions and deletions–by using it only as a typewriter and file cabinet.  Note the devices and programs used by NSA are at least 5 years old. Excerpts from the Times: WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the…

A longer report was published in Haaretz, with an excerpt below:  … In December 2008, the [Israeli Medical Association] investigative committee published a report, which found grave fault with the way in which soldiers were recruited for the experiment, and the unscrupulous methods for achieving the soldiers’ consent – which included failure to inform them…

From the Jerusalem Post, the Israeli MOD has settled with 100 former soldiers who were used in anthrax vaccine experiments and reported subsequent illnesses; money has been set aside to compensate other subjects in the trial who were not part of the original lawsuit. The Israeli MOD’s claim that the Israeli anthrax vaccine “is as…

Thanks to Lawrence Solomon, writing for Huffington Post, who explains that media’s approach to those who question vaccine safety defies rational explanation.  Highly regarded scientists, whose job it was to review the safety of vaccines, have persistent questions about their safety in large, unscreened populations (as do I).  Those who question vaccination programs are kooks…

California’s state Senate voted 31-1 to ban state officials and state corporations from participating with federal agencies to collect electronic data on any persons in a sweeping, rather than individual, fashion. Silicon Valley entities like Google are located in California; they have been ordered by federal officials to participate in surveillance activities.  This bill, if…

From the WSJ: WASHINGTON—A federal judge on Monday ruled against the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records, saying the program “almost certainly does violate” the Constitution. However, the ruling will have little immediate effect and faces a lengthy future of court proceedings. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who was nominated to the Washington, D.C.,…

Anonymous sourcing is far too common in major media.  Usually, when unsourced comments appear in articles about controversial subjects to do with government, the source is providing officially sanctioned disinformation, imho. As a way in to this issue, the WP is talking about the cockamamie excuses that sources have given for refusing to allow publication…

Pam Weintraub, editor of Discover Magazine, has an in-depth piece on problems with commonly used drugs on the ExperienceLife website.   The acid blockers (proton pump inhibitors like Prilosec or Nexium), sold over-the-counter or by prescription, can cause a variety of problems from long-term use.  Getting off them can be a challenge, because a hyperacidity…

For 60 years, US factory farms have included broad-spectrum antibiotics in the feed for livestock. It is said to promote growth. It also promotes antibiotic resistance.  Fully 80% (30 million pounds) of the antibiotics used in the US are fed to animals who provide our meat and dairy products. In 1977, FDA announced it planned…

Are the Intelligence Committees Being Blackmailed? During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on two prominent politicians – Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker – as well as critics of government policy Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, and a Washington Post humorist. A recently declassified history written by the NSA itself called the effort “disreputable if not…

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard McKeon, (R-California), speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta From Wired: An excerpt, but suggest you read the whole story and see where your rep fell. The numbers tell the story — in votes and…

Although Secretary of State Kerry said there were multiple nations with whom the US was negotiating to take and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, none took him up on the offer. So the US, working with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, plans to take a US cargo ship and turn it into a…

The risk of narcolepsy was 13 times higher among those given the Pandemrix vacciney Ireland’s Health Services (HSE) wrote to families of children with narcolepsy with the threat to withhold health benefits from Pandemrix vaccine-induced narcolepsy sufferers if they sued for benefits.  Sufferers went to court today to quash the health system’s order. In response, HSE’s…

Hersh has written an in-depth piece on the intelligence about Syria’s chemical weapons attack in the London Review of Books, suggesting parallels with the justifications created for the war on Iraq in 2003. His final two paragraphs note that Al-Nusra rebels may be the only group left with access to sarin in Syria soon: The…

http://www.gocomics.com/stevebenson/2013/09/08#.UqKtwmRDsrd Steve Benson by Steve Benson September 08, 2013 Previous feature Next feature Current

How do governments do business with each other?  Of course they often share goals, and may benefit jointly from certain actions.  But at the most basic level, they offer each other carrots and threaten each other with sticks. Using some combination of these two strategies, the US government obtained the cooperation of 54 governments to…

From NBC  we learn Obama is going to give Americans more “confidence” in the NSA.  “I’ll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence.” But lack of confidence is not the problem.  Setting up a straw man to knock down “is an intentional misrepresentation of an opponent’s position, often used…

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…