Thyroid Cancers Surge Among Fukushima Youths

It seems US sailors aren't the only ones who three short years after the Fukushima disaster are being stricken by cancers and other radiation-induced diseases. For once, the media blackout surrounding the Japanese nuclear power plant tragedy appears to have crumbled, and at least a portion of the truth has been revealed. Hong Kong's SCMP reports that fifty-nine young people in Fukushima prefecture have been diagnosed with or are suspected of having thyroid cancer. 

Notably, all of newly diagnosed were younger than 18 at the time of the nuclear meltdown in the area in March 2011. They were identified in tests by the prefectural government, which covered 239,000 people by the end of September.

And while it is not rocket surgery to put two and two together, now that the data is in the public domain, here come the experts to explain it away.

On one hand, there are those who seemingly have not been bribed by the Abe government to "bend" reality just a bit in the name of confidence. People such as Toshihide Tsuda, a professor of epidemiology at Okayama University who has called upon the government to prepare for a possible increase in cases in the future. 

"The rate at which children in Fukushima prefecture have developed thyroid cancer can be called frequent, because it is several times to several tens of times higher," Japan's Asahi Shimbun quoted him as saying.

He compared the figures in Fukushima with cancer registration statistics throughout Japan from 1975 to 2008 that showed an annual average of five to 11 people in their late teens to early 20s developing cancer for every 1 million people.

And then come those who probably would still be touting the great job Tepco is doing in containing the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, even though Tepco itself has now admitted the exploded nuclear power plant is out of control. Read more >>

Atlantic City and Las Vegas facing catastrophic collapse

With the closure of the recent Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, rumors of the bankrupt Revel being sold to Hard Rock, more than half of the mortgages in Las Vegas under water, casinos opening up all around the country and online gambling legislation underway in various states, it seems as if the reasons for the very existence of Atlantic City and Las Vegas are in serious jeopardy.

In Las Vegas alone, more than half of properties with mortgages are still underwater, or worth less than the loans against them, according to Zillow Inc., a real estate data firm.

Trendy hotels like SLS Las Vegas are set to open in 2014, in an effort to reinvent the city as purely an entertainment paradise.

One local said “The reality is, people just won’t fly to the middle of a desert to play some slots, watch shows and sit down for some blackjack when they can drive right near their town or city, or play legally online.”

And now it looks like the feds may soon allow online gambling across the United States.

Last May, the American Gaming Association called on Congress to enact federal legislation that would allow states to license and regulate online poker so Americans who play can do so safely using responsible, law-abiding operators.

The Department of Justice made a decision that the Federal Wire Act only prohibits the transmission of communications relative to bets or wagers on sporting events or contests. It also clarifies that intrastate lottery tickets sold online are legal, so long as the lottery games do not involve sport wagering, even if the transmission crosses state lines.

Officials say this has opened up the possibility that online gambling may get approved on a federal level.

New Jersey is the third state in the U.S. to have authorized internet gambling.  However, these online casinos are owned and controlled by Atlantic City casinos in an effort to boost profits in the face of fierce competition. Read more >>

GOVT Giving More Housing Aid to Rich Than Poor

The Center for Budget Policy Priorities released a number of charts today that shows how much the federal government favors high-income households over low-income ones in housing benefits.

This largely results from the fact that homeowners receive significantly more aid than renters and high-income Americans are much more likely to be homeowners.

In 2012, the federal government gave out $240 billion in housing aid. Income data is not available for all of it, but of what is available, more than half went to those with incomes greater than $100,000 ($81.6 billion). Only $40 billion went to those with incomes less than $50,000.

Overall, high income households receive four times as much in housing aid as low-income ones.

The main reason for this is the majority of federal housing aid flows to homeowners, not renters. The mortgage interest deduction is the most well-known program that subsidizes homeownership. That deduction alone is larger than all federal rental aid combined.

The federal government gave out about $60 billion in housing benefits to renters in 2012. It gave out more than three times that much to homeowners. Low-income households receive the vast majority of that rental aid, but the opposite is true of aid to homeowners. That flows primarily to high-income households. Read more >>

Dolphins Suffering From Lung Disease Due to Gulf Oil Spill

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Site
(Photo credit: Green Fire Productions)

Dolphins in an area hard hit by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 are suffering from lung diseases and other abnormalities that are consistent with toxic exposure to oil, according to a study backed by the federal government and released on Wednesday.

The peer-reviewed paper, which was disputed by BP BP.LN +1.07%  PLC, was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The paper makes the strongest connection to date between the BP spill and dolphin deaths, which jumped in the Gulf of Mexico after the spill.

"It is related to oil," said Lori Schwacke, the study's lead author and a wildlife epidemiologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The weight of evidence is there."

BP, which paid for the study, disputes that it shows a clear link between the spill and dolphin illnesses. NOAA "still hasn't provided BP with any data demonstrating that the alleged poor health of any dolphins was caused by oil exposure," said BP spokesman Jason Ryan in an email.

The study was released the same morning a federal jury in New Orleans convicted an engineer who worked for BP in 2010 of destroying evidence about the oil spill. Prosecutors argued that the engineer, Kurt Mix, deleted hundreds of text messages to try to hide evidence that the company knew more oil was leaking than it had revealed publicly. Read more >>

Facebook can see what users type even if status is not posted

Facebook has said that it is within its terms of service to see what users are typing even when the status or comment is never posted on the social network.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company confirmed that it can track users' unpublished posts after two Facebook researchers disclosed that they had tracked the activity of about 5 million random Facebook users in the U.S. and England.

The researchers' study looked at how often these users censored themselves while typing posts and comments on Facebook. If users typed more than five characters, the content was tracked. It was considered to be self-censored if it was not published within 10 minutes of being typed.

Facebook said the study did not track the exact words and letters that users typed, but whether or not they typed something. The methodology for the study also kept the tracked users anonymous, Facebook said.

“This is something we looked at to understand to what extent people self censor,” Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld told The Times.

Facebook said it was no longer tracking any users when it comes to unpublished posts. It also has no plans to track the unpublished words and letters that users type.

But Facebook said the study was conducted in accordance to the terms of service that every user agrees to when they sign up for the social network.

So where in Facebook's terms of service is this justified? The company said this is covered in its Data Use Policy. Read more >>

Price of Ground Beef Hits All-Time High

The average price for a pound of ground beef hit its all-time in the United States in November, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In January 1980, when BLS started tracking the average price of 100-percent beef  ground chuck, a pound cost $1.82. By this November, the same pound of ground beef cost $3.61 per pound. That was up from $3.49 per pound in October.

A decade ago, in November 2003, a pound of ground chuck cost $2.49. Since then, the price has gone up 45 percent. Read more >>

Camden, New Jersey: One Of Hundreds Of U.S. Cities That Are Turning Into Rotting, Decaying Hellholes

All over America, formerly prosperous communities are being transformed into crime-infested wastelands of poverty and despair.  Of course the most famous example of this is Detroit.  At one time, Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city that the world had ever seen and it had the highest per capita income in the entire country.  But now it has become a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the planet laughs at.

And of course Detroit is far from alone.  There are hundreds of other U.S. cities that are suffering a similar fate.  In this article, the focus is going to be on Camden, New Jersey, but the truth is that there are lots of other "Detroits" and "Camdens" all over the nation.  Jobs and businesses are leaving our cities at a staggering rate, and what is being left behind is poverty, crime and extreme desperation.

Earlier this month, Rolling Stone published an article that took a hard look at the nightmare conditions that exist in Camden.  A city that once made Campbell's soup and some of this nation's most famous warships is now a national disgrace.  The following are six of the best quotes out of that article...

-"In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today."

-"Their home is a city with thousands of abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats." Read more >>

The number of children taking powerful antipsychotic drugs has nearly tripled

The number of children taking powerful antipsychotic drugs has nearly tripled over the last 10 to 15 years, according to recent research. The increase comes not because of an epidemic of schizophrenia or other forms of serious mental illness in children, but because doctors are increasingly prescribing the drugs to treat behavior problems, a use not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And a disproportionate number of those prescriptions are written for poor and minority children, some as young as age 2.

Doctors are prescribing antipsychotics even though there’s minimal evidence that the drugs help kids for approved uses, much less the unapproved ones, such as behavioral problems. And to make matters worse, the little research there is suggests the drugs can cause troubling side effects, including weight gain, high cholesterol, and an increased risk of type-2 diabetes.

Doctors can legally—and commonly do—write prescriptions for any medication they see fit to treat a condition. (See here for more details on off-label prescribing)

But overuse of antipsychotic drugs has become worrisome enough that the American Psychiatric Association recently announced that doctors should not routinely prescribe the drugs as first-line treatment to children and adolescents for any reason other than psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or severe tic disorders. The association is so concerned that it chose to include this issue as part of Choosing Wisely, an initiative in which Consumer Reports has jointed the ABIM Foundation and national medical societies to identify tests and treatments to question. Read more >>

Soaring rents force Londoners to live in shipping containers

A London charity has imported steel containers from China and converted them into bargain basement homes, as part of a novel solution to try and solve homelessness amid soaring rents in the British capital.

A hostel in east London has come up with the ingenious idea of converting a shipping container from China into a tiny low cost home for hard up and desperate Londoners.

Although it’s only a steel box, they are calling it mYpad, as notwithstanding how small it is, it’s a compact home with a tiny kitchen, bathroom and living quarters complete with a flat screen TV and a single bed.

Lying on your bed, you could almost imagine you were in a bunk on a ship, perhaps the one on which the containers were transported.

But as rents in London continue to soar, putting most flats and houses out of reach of many people on low incomes or benefits, these may be part of the solution.

A mYpad costs just £75 a week. While in some parts of the UK this is cheap but not a giveaway, in London it’s unheard of. In the British capital the average rent, even in a distant borough where oligarchs wouldn’t venture, alive or dead, is around £300 a week. Read more >>

New H7N9 bird flu resists drugs without losing ability to spread

Scientists have found that a mutation in a new strain of bird flu infecting people in China can render it resistant to a key first-line treatment drug without limiting its ability to spread in mammals.

The discovery means that unlike seasonal flu strains, which often become less transmissible when they develop resistance to drugs like Roche's Tamiflu, the new H7N9 bird flu does not lose any of its spreading potential with drug resistance.

While this does not make H7N9 any more likely to develop into a human pandemic, researchers said it means doctors should be prudent in their use of anti-viral medicines to treat H7N9 cases, and consider using drugs other than Tamiflu, such as GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, where possible.

"It's important to emphasize that these H7N9 viruses seem to transmit fairly inefficiently overall," said Nicole Bouvier, who led the H7N9 study which was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

"But what was surprising about our study was that the drug-resistant virus was no less efficient than the drug-sensitive one. Usually what we see with influenza, is that resistance...also confers a fitness disadvantage on the virus." Read more >>