Abortion opponents long ago slapped their brand on the fetus, parading giant graphic images of fetuses in marches and now calling for laws mandating pictures of fetuses inside a woman's body via sonograms – sometimes even broadcasting them live in anti-abortion campaigns.
(Image via RH Reality Check)

By separating fetuses from the fetal environment, they make women into enemies of the fetus. But with evidence that the fetal environment is being involuntarily polluted by toxins spewed into the air, water, food and products, something is askew.

Currently, there is sharp contrast in how the government wields a big stick to protect fetal life when restricting abortion, but fails to limit toxic chemical exposure to protect fetal life -- let alone the health of pregnant women.

"You cannot separate the woman from the fetus. If you want good outcomes for the fetus, you need to focus on the woman," said Luisa Cabal, Director of the International Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York City. "The government should take steps that don't harm women to protect prenatal life."

There are people who care about facts. And then there are peak oil deniers.

Whether or not peak oil is true cannot possibly be in doubt. Within anything other than a geological frame of time, oil is a finite substance. When it is burned, it is gone. Without stretching our brains very far, it is easy to conclude that anything that is finite and consumed will someday be gone.

Peak Oil, then, is really an observation, not a theory.

If only! What most four-year olds would agree is not much more than minimal common sense continues to confound some, who just cannot bring themselves to accept facts and a reality contrary to a carefully-crafted storyline where facts are inconvenient at best.

The latest foray into the fact- and stats- and context-free world of denying the obvious comes courtesy of Canadian economist Sherry Cooper, whose basic premise about the invalidity of Peak Oil seems tempered by the many troublesome production facts contained in her essay. What follows are assessments and observations she offered in leading to her conclusion:

Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists show that between 2009 and 2011, prescription drug, biotechnology and medical device companies spent more than $700 million lobbying Congress and the Obama administration.

That’s a lot of money. By comparison, the insurance industry spent $480 million in the same period. Drug companies alone spent more than $487 million on lobbying during the three-year period; biotechnology and medical device companies spent $126 million and $86 million, respectively.

Over the same period, elected officials on a House subcommittee and a Senate committee with oversight over FDA received nearly $6.3 million in campaign contributions from these industries. Donations went to both Republicans and Democrats.

Explore the major findings from our investigation and see all of the data we relied upon using the links to the right. ..............

..... The current food crisis is largely down to erratic rains and localized dry spells in 2011. As agronomist Oumar Niangado explains, agriculture in the Sahel has always been vulnerable to low rainfall. ‘In certain places there are good systems of agricultural collectives, plus strong NGOsupport,’ says Niangado, ‘but with our dependence on rain-fed crops and poor irrigation, one bad rainy season can ruin everything.’

This was the case in 2010, when drought triggered an acute wave of hunger that affected 10 million people in the region. The global food price spikes of 2008 were another shock that pushed the vulnerable into crisis once more. Meanwhile, Oxfam has warned that the world is entering an era of permanent food crisis, predicting that global warming and resource pressures may cause staple crop yields in developing countries to plummet dramatically over the next 20 years.

Oxfam has warned that the world is entering an era of permanent food crisis

Governments and NGOs are scrambling to prevent a repeat of the Horn of Africa famine, which is thought to have killed up to 100,000 people last year. Early warning alerts late last year prompted several Sahelian governments to set up food distribution programmes and issue calls for international assistance. In February, the European Union pledged €125 million ($166 million) in aid to the Sahel, while Britain has donated £3 million ($4.7 million) to the region. .....

There’s a great deal of talk about Sgt. Robert Bales, the apparent gunman in the villages in Kandahar, and whether he had PTSD or other impairments. And we’re right to be concerned about the still-inadequate care U.S. veterans get when they come home – soldiers can be simultaneously victim and war criminal. (Iraq Veterans Against the War have mobilized their Operation Recovery campaign to defend soldiers’ right to heal before being redeployed – a campaign that also denies the Pentagon access to these young instruments of battle for illegal wars.) But we shouldn’t forget that those 2/3 of Afghans – something like 20 million people – face PTSD or other mental disorders with only FORTY-TWO psychiatrists and psychologists in the entire country. I talked about this reality on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show last week, as well as the potential consequences for U.S. policy and decisions about ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan. You can follow the link if you want to listen or read the transcript. (And it would be great if you comment too…)

WHO DOES NOT WANT WAR IN IRAN?

One of the most useful tools in mobilizing opposition to war in Iran comes from the statements of top U.S. and Israeli officials themselves:

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta asked and answered his own Iran question: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.”

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. admitted the U.S. does not even know "if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

The latest 2011 National Intelligence Estimate makes clear there is no new evidence to challenge the 2007 conclusions; Iran still does not have a nuclear weapons program in operation.

George Galloway's stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford by-election has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was unexpected, and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much of the media (Helen Pidd of the Guardian being an honorable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC toady, an obviously partisan compere on a local TV election show, who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat his excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labor fiefdom since 1973, was considered safe and the Labor leader, Ed Miliband, had been planning a celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through at 2 am. He is now once again focused on his own future. Labor has paid the price for its failure to act as an opposition, having imagined that all it had to do was wait and the prize would come its way. Scottish politics should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the latest development in English politics now will, though I doubt it. Galloway has effectively urinated on all three parties. The Lib Dems and Tories explain their decline by the fact that too many people voted!

Thousands of young people infected with apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream politics were dynamized by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on these occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator, though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was the political content of the campaign that galvanized the youth: Respect campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal, and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labor party for the austerity measures targeting the less well off, the poor and the infirm, and the new privatizations of education, health and the Post Office. It was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000. .........

On Oct. 16, 2010, Mr. Pelette, 38, woke at dawn in his solitary room behind a bric-a-brac shop off the town square. As was his habit, he loped down the hill to the Latem River for his bath, passing the beauty shop, the pharmacy and the funeral home where his body would soon be prepared for burial.

The river would have been busy that morning, with bathers, laundresses and schoolchildren brushing their teeth. Nobody thought of its flowing waters, downstream from a United Nations peacekeeping base, as toxic.

When Mr. Pelette was found lying by the bank a few hours later, he was so weak from a sudden, violent stomach illness that he had to be carried back to his room. It did not immediately occur to his relatives to rush him to the hospital.

While the Food and Drug Administration has seemingly reached the limit for unbelievable behavior, the company’s decisions continue to astound and appall consumers and health activists alike.

In the agency’s latest decision, undoubtedly amazing thousands of individuals yet again, the FDA virtually erased 1 million signatures and comments on the ‘Just Label It’ campaign calling for the labeling of genetically modified foods.

The ‘Just Label It” campaign has gotten more signatures than any campaign in history for the labeling of genetically modified foods. Since October of 2011, the campaign has received over 900,000 signatures, with 55 politicians joining in on the movement. So what’s the problem here?

Evidently, the FDA counts the amount of signatures not by how many people signed, but how many different individual letters are brought to it. To the FDA, even tens of thousands of signatures presented on a single petition are counted as – you guessed it – a single comment.

The giant U.S. agribusiness Monsanto was found guilty on Monday Feb. 13, after being sued by a small farmer from Charente who had been poisoned by a herbicide. This event is a first in France. On the scale of the history of the one-hundred-year-old multinational, this sentence constitutes just one more episode in an already long record of court procedures.

PCBs, Agent Orange, dioxin, GMO, Aspartame, growth hormones, herbicides (Lasso and Roundup) ... a number of products that have made ​​the fortune of Monsanto, have been marred by health scandals and trials sometimes leading to their prohibition. But nothing has so far hindered the irresistible rise of this former chemical giant who converted back to biogenetics and has mastered the art of lobbying. Portrait of a multinational multi-recidivist. ........

"Some of modern medicine's most heralded interventions -- from routine surgeries to organ transplants and cancer treatments -- may soon be too dangerous. The viability of these procedures hinges on physicians' ability to use antibiotics to swiftly vanquish any bacterial infections that might arise in the course of treatment. For decades, physicians have been able to choose from hundreds of different kinds of antibiotics to do the job, including many powerful "broad spectrum" varieties that indiscriminately kill a wide range of bacteria. But over the past two decades, antibiotic drugs have started to fail one by one, as bacteria with resistance to them have emerged and spread. Taming the new drug-resistant pathogens requires ever more toxic, expensive, and time-consuming therapies, such as a class of last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems, which must be administered intravenously in hospitals. In the United States alone, fighting drug-resistant infections costs up to 8 million additional patient hospital days and up to $34 billion every year (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/suppl_5/S397.full).

Now, the emergence in India of a particularly nasty form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which renders even the last-resort drugs obsolete, could bring about an era of unstoppable infections. To contain the bacteria, South Asian governments must quickly reform their public health practices and medical manufacturers must fast-track the development of new drugs. But with the Indian political establishment prioritizing building up its lucrative private health sector over making costly public health reforms, and policies aimed at recalibrating drug research and development in the West stymied, the political will to accomplish the job is scarce.

In India, antibiotic use is virtually unregulated. Antibiotics are widely available without a prescription and, as in the United States, affluent people tend to consume the drugs whether medically necessary or not -- for everything from colds to diarrhea. Meanwhile, when ill, India's poor tend to scrape together a few rupees to buy a couple doses of antibiotic at a time, enough to quell their symptoms but not enough to clear their infections. Both patterns of consumption contribute to the development of drug-resistant bacteria. So, it is no wonder that, even before the new super-resistant strain was first documented, over 50 percent of the bacterial infections that occurred in Indian hospitals were resistant to commonly used antibiotics............"