Blog for a Better World

Some scientists believe that there is reason to believe that Gaucho, a pesticide, and other members of a family of highly toxic chemicals — neonicotinoids — may be responsible for the deaths of billions of honeybees worldwide. They believe that these pesticides, which are applied to seeds, travel systemically through the plant and leave residues that contaminate the pollen, resulting in bee death or paralysis. The French refer to the effect as “mad bee disease” and in 1999 were the first to ban the use of these chemicals, which are currently only marketed by Bayer (the aspirin people) under the trade names Gaucho and Pancho. Germany followed suit this year.  In 2002, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted an emergency exemption allowing increase use of Gaucho.  The agency also granted a conditional registration for its close relative, Pancho, allowing the chemical on the market with only partial testing.

A retired medical supply manufacturer who considers bisphenol A to be perfectly safe gave $5 million to the research center headed by the chairman of a Food and Drug Administration panel about to rule on the chemical’s safety.  The donation from Charles Gelman is nearly 50 times the annual budget of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center, where Martin Philbert is founder and co-director. Philbert did not disclose the donation to the FDA, and agency officials learned of it when reporters asked about it. Gelman said he considers the chemical, which is used to make baby bottles and aluminum can liners, to be safe.  The decision of Philbert’s committee is expected to have huge implications on the regulation and sale of the chemical in items such as baby bottles, reusable food containers and plastic wraps. Since the late 1990s, studies have linked bisphenol A to cancer, heart disease, obesity, reproductive failures and hyperactivity in laboratory animals.

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency’s public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years. The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.  From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said that NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public. News releases suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency and scientific dilution.”

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab, in tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away. The FBI eventually focused on Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide.  Colleagues and friends of Ivins remained convinced that he was innocent; he had neither the motive nor the means to create the lethal powder that was sent by mail to new outlets and congressional offices in 2001.  They contend that the FBI has no evidence and that a lot of the tactics that they used were designed to isolate him from his support. The FBI just continued to push his buttons.

Former President Gerald Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI’s conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  The new details were included in 500 pages of the FBI’s large file on Ford, released in part last August in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act that the Associated Press and others made on the day Ford died in December 2006.  Apparently, the fact that Ford served as the FBI’s eyes and ears inside the commission has been known for years. Long ago, the government released a 1963 FBI memo that said Ford had volunteered to keep the FBI informed about the panel’s private deliberations, but only if that relationship remained confidential. The FBI agreed. It was also well-known that Ford was an outspoken proponent of the bureau’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed to act for at least a year on warnings that trailers housing refugees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to a House subcommittee report released on October 6. Instead, the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry demoted the scientist who questioned its initial assessment that the trailers were safe as long as residents opened a window or another vent, the report said. That appraisal was produced in February 2007 at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had received thousands of complaints about fumes since providing the trailers to families left homeless by the devastating 2005 hurricanes. Formaldehyde is known to cause cancer, chronic bronchitis, eye irritation and other ailments.  The subcommittee’s report came three days after a federal judge in New Orleans ruled that FEMA can be sued by hurricane victims who claim they were exposed to toxic fumes.

According to current and former bureau officials, the FBI is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis.  The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. The cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes. The cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels. 

Hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.  As one of the intercept operators said, these were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in the area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones. US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted as they called their offices or homes in the United States.  Intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.  

Civil liberties groups started a legal challenge to the new federal law designed to dismiss their wiretapping suits against telecommunications companies, saying the statute violates phone customers’ constitutional rights and tramples on judicial authority. The law granted retroactive protection to AT&T, Verizon and other companies against lawsuits accusing them of illegally sharing their telephone and e-mail networks and millions of customer records with the National Security Agency. The law requires judges to dismiss the cases if the Justice Department tells them the companies had cooperated in a surveillance program authorized by President Bush. The ACLU maintains that Congress and President Bush lack authority to order courts to whitewash constitutional violations.

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Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, accused the Bush administration of a cover-up aimed at stopping the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from tackling greenhouse emissions.  She claims that the cover-up is being directed from the White House and the office of the vice president.  At issue is a preliminary finding by the EPA last December that greenhouse gases may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public welfare.  Such a finding would be an early step toward government regulation aimed at protecting public health.  Jason Burnett, the EPA’s former associate deputy administrator, who resigned on June 9, told Boxer’s committee the White House tried pressuring him to retract an e-mail in which he detailed the finding. Burnett said he refused.

The Bush administration is proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants. Agencies also could not consider a project’s contribution to global warming in their analysis. Environmentalists complained the proposals would gut protections for endangered animals and plants. John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation, said that if adopted, these changes would seriously weaken the safety net of habitat protections that we have relied upon to protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years.

Battered by outrage over the $440,000 it spent on a luxury retreat less than a week after the federal government loaned it $85 billion dollars, the giant AIG Insurance Company called off plans to hold a second retreat at the exclusive Ritz-Carlton Resort in Half Moon Bay, California. The Ritz-Carlton outing, like the earlier one, was to reward top independent insurance agents, which the company called a standard industry practice.  Critics have referred to the Ritz-Carlton conference as nothing less than a slap in the face of the American people.  In addition, it was hard to fathom how in the same very day that AIG asked the government for another $37.8 billion loan, the company would have moved forward with plans to host another large conference at another luxury resort.

Confidential documents obtained by a leading newspaper in England reveal that Gordon Brown and other European leaders are secretly preparing an unprecedented campaign to spread genetically modified (GM) crops and foods in Britain and throughout the continent. The documents are minutes of a series of private meetings of representatives of 27 governments that disclose plans to speed up the introduction of the modified crops and foods and to deal with public resistance to them.  The documents also make clear how Mr. Barroso, the pro-GM President of the Commission, is going beyond mere exhortation by trying to get prime ministers to overrule their own agriculture and environment ministers in favor of GM. 

Government and industry sources are saying that the Treasury Department is dramatically expanding the scope of its bailout of the financial system with a plan to take ownership stakes in the nation’s insurance companies, signaling new concerns about a sector of the economy whose troubles until now have been overshadowed by the banking industry.  Insurers including The Hartford, Prudential and MetLife, have pushed the Bush administration to include them in the plan. Many firms have taken losses from mortgage-related securities and other investments and are struggling to replenish their coffers.  The new initiative underscores the growing range of problems that Treasury is scrambling to address with the $700 billion allocated by Congress last month.