occupyallstreets:

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Unclassified Memo Shows That The Army Knew Burn Pits Causes Illnesses
Since returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, an untold number of soldiers have come down with puzzling health problems. Chronic bronchitis. Neurological defects. Even cancer. Many of them are pointing the finger at a single culprit: The open-air “burn pits” that incinerated trash — from human waste to computer parts — on military bases overseas.
Pentagon officials have consistently reassured personnel that there was no “specific evidence” connecting the two. But now, only days after Danger Room uncovered a memo suggesting that Army officials knew how dangerous the pits were, an animal study is offering up new scientific evidence that links burn pits to depleted immune systems.
“The dust doesn’t only appear to cause lung inflammation,” says Dr. Anthony Szema, an assistant professor at Stony Brook School of Medicine who specializes in pulmonology and allergies, and the researcher who led this latest study. “It also destroys the body’s own T-cells.” Those cells are at the core of the body’s immune system, “like a bulletproof vest against illnesses,” Szema tells Danger Room. When they’re depleted, an individual is much more prone to myriad conditions.
The unclassified memo (.jpg), dated April 15, 2011, stated that high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram Airfield for most of the war are likely to impact veterans’ health for the rest of their lives.

“The long term health risk” from breathing in Bagram’s particulate-rich air include “reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, atherosclerosis, or other cardiopulmonary diseases.” Service members may not necessarily “acquire adverse long term pulmonary or heart conditions,” but “the risk for such is increased.”

Accordingly, the health risks were not limited to troops serving at Bagram in 2011, the memo states. The health hazards are an assessment of “air samples taken over approximately the last eight years” at the base.
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Obama’s Rather Impressive List Of “Accomplishments”

mediaexposed:

Whoever said that Obama hasn’t acomplished anything in his first term?

WHAT AN IMPRESSIVE LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS!…    

  • First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
  • First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
  • First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
  • First President to violate the War Powers Act.
  • First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • First President to defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.
  • First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party, a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
  • First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.
  • First President to recommend changing our National Anthem as it portrays and promotes violence and is warlike in its theme.
  • First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer Breakfast and activities.
  • First President to initiate a Cash for Clunkers Program to clean up exhaust that adds to global warming, then extended it because it was so popular — wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
  • First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
  • First President to bypass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
  • First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
  • First President to demand a company hand over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
  • First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.
  • First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
  • First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
  • First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.
  • First President to tell a major manufacturing company which state they are allowed to locate a factory in.
  • First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
  • First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
  • First President to fire an inspector general of Americorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
  • First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
  • First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 90 to date.
  • First President to pledge complete transparency while campaigning, then hide his medical, educational,and travel records.
  • First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
  • First President to go on multiple global ‘apology tours’.
  • First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends; paid for by the taxpayer
  • First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
  • First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

(Source: westernjournalism.com)

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beatyourselfup:

We’re Number One!
hammeredtimesthree:

It has to change.
mediaexposed:

theatlantic:

The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History

In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three month, it’s about to become official: unless a freak blizzard blankets the country by Thursday, the spring of 2012 will go down as the warmest for the U.S. in 117 years of record-keeping. The National Climatic Data Center won’t release a report on the temperatures in May until sometime in June, but based on their assessment of March and April, University of Maryland professor Steve Scolnik, who blogs at Climate Capital, says that our warm May will smash the 102-year-old record.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire. [Image: Dino Grandoni]
life:

In 1944, LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a private moment repeated in public millions of times over the course of the war: a guy, a girl, a goodbye — and no assurance that he’ll make it back. By war’s end, more than 400,000 American troops had been killed.
See more photos here.
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