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Want to Try Herbal Remedies? 4 Ways to Make Sure You Don’t Get Ripped Off (Or Worse)

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Herbal products can work wonders, but sometimes the products on the shelf are overpriced, ineffective or even unsafe.

By Jill Richardson / AlterNet

You’re not feeling well, so you head to the grocery store for some herbal tea. Or perhaps you pass a booth at your farmers’ market, full of herbal concoctions to cure every ill. Thanks to a 1994 law known as DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), herbal products cannot promise to actually cure you of anything. Rather, they offer to support or promote a specific body part or function.

To most of us, it’s all the same, whether a tea, tincture or capsule promises to help cure our cold or “support upper respiratory health and immune function.” You see the promise, you buy the product, but does it work? Did you get ripped off?   [Read more…]

Do These Chemicals Make Me Look Fat?

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By David Epstein / ProPublica

Everyone knows Americans are fat and getting fatter, and everyone thinks they know why: more eating and less moving.

But the “big two” factors may not be the whole story. Consider this: Animals have been getting fatter too. The National Pet Obesity Survey recently reported that more than 50 percent of cats and dogs — that’s more than 80 million pets — are overweight or obese. Pets have gotten so plump that there’s now a National Pet Obesity Awareness Day. (It was Wednesday.) Lap dogs and comatose cats aren’t alone in the fat animal kingdom. Animals in strictly controlled research laboratories that have enforced the same diet and lifestyle for decades are also ballooning.   [Read more…]

Extreme Weather Watch: September 2013, Floods in Boulder and Mexico

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By John Lawrence

Boulder, CO –The rain began to fall on Monday, September 9. Experts would ultimately call it a 1,000-year rain and a 100-year flood. By Thursday September 12, Little James Creek began ripping buildings from their foundations and sending roofs plunging into basements. Roads were closed and still the rain kept coming.

In the city of Boulder, Boulder Creek was roaring at a rate of 3,104 cubic feet per second, according to Boulder police Chief Mark Beckner. Two days before, it had been flowing at a leisurely 54 cfs.

At 1:40 AM on Thursday University of Colorado officials issued a text alert ordering faculty and staff residents living in university housing near Boulder Creek to evacuate. Soon, CU and the Boulder Valley School District would both announce they were closing down.   [Read more…]

Is Climate Change Caused by Human Activity or by Natural Cyclical Phenomena?

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The British newspaper, the Guardian, wrote that the conservative American Enterprise Institute offered $10,000 and a very generous out-of-pocket compensation for any article written by a scientist that brought the credibility of the IPCC in doubt

By Frank Thomas

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been around for 25 years. In their report released last Friday, IPCC data surprisingly suggested a “15 year pause” in climate warming … a cooling period perhaps not too dissimilar to what occurred before in 1965-79.   [Read more…]

Body Snatchers: The Parasites of Mission Bay

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By Micaela Porte

When wildlife enthusiasts, researchers and professors met recently at UCSD Kendall-Frost Mission Bay Reserve, they had one thing on their minds:  the microscopic parasites that inhabit Mission Bay.

The presentation was delivered by Ryan Hechinger, a UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute professor, who stated that trematodes, such as the common flatworm, frequently make their way from marsh bird feces into host organisms, like a horned snail, California Achilles fish and fiddler crab, among others. From there, they perform a key role in the regulation of marsh bio-systems.   [Read more…]

Shooting Elephants in the Face: Well-Done, A Lot of “Fun” on NBC

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by Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Just when you thought you couldn’t hate the NRA any more comes this video from Under Wild Skies, an NRA-sponsored, so-called sports show being inexplicably aired by NBC, in which tough guy, Indiana Jones-wannabee and NRA lobbyist Tony Makris bravely goes forth into Botswana to massacre an elephant – an act about to be but not quite yet illegal – finally downing it on the third shot by shooting it in the face and then gleefully gloating, after the suffering animal charged him, that “somebody got a little cheeky there.”   [Read more…]

Sweet Tweets, Cold Cash and Barrio Logan on San Diego’s Mayoral Campaign Trail

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By Doug Porter

 Tuesday night’s vote by the San Diego Democratic Central Committee was a clear victory for backers of Councilman David Alvarez’s mayoral aspirations.  If for no other reason, the endorsement was important in raising the councilman’s name recognition, both for the headlines it produced and the cash that will now flow from Democratic Party coffers boosting his candidacy.

Others with skin in this game reacted in differing ways.

A much heralded spat between United Food and Commercial Workers President Mickey Kasparian (who supports Alvarez) and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (Nathan Fletcher’s booster), appears to have passed.  After all, the vote is over, and the party did vote to support whichever of those candidates wins the November 19th primary.   [Read more…]

Barrio Logan Community Plan Update Alternative 1 Passes

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Not All Stakeholders Are Pleased With Compromise

By Brent E. Beltrán

I have never been to a San Diego City Council meeting before. Never had a need nor did I ever care about the goings on inside the council’s chamber on the 12th floor of City Hall. But that changed on Tuesday, September 17. That was the day that the council was to vote upon the Barrio Logan Community Plan Update.

For five years the Barrio Logan Community Plan Update Stakeholders Committee held meetings to create a new community plan for Barrio Logan. A plan that would change the mixed use zoning that has been detrimental to the health and welfare of the residents of this predominantly working class, Mexican neighborhood. The Stakeholders were to create a plan that would delineate industrial areas from residential ones and create a barrier of sorts between the two.

For five years the various Barrio Logan Stakeholders met time and time again to create this plan. It was a democratic process. Votes were cast overwhelmingly in favor of Alternative 1 yet the maritime industry that has been polluting this community for decades kept holding out hope that their plan, Alternative 2, would ultimately be voted on and implemented by the San Diego City Council.   [Read more…]

Say No to Paying San Onofre Nuke Shutdown Costs: “You Break It, You Buy It”

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By Doug Porter

The shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was a significant blow to the nuclear power industry. Although the twin reactors were licensed to operate until 2022, a new steam generator system installed in reactor unit 2 in 2009 and unit 3 in 2010 failed less than two years after vibrations caused heavy alloy tubes in each steam generator to rub against one another.

Critics of Southern California Edison contend the utility and its supplier Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, hid the risks of the new system they installed. Hoping to sidestep the potentially lengthy process of obtaining a license amendment, the company appealed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board for permission to restart unit 2 at 70 percent of capacity.

Following a negative ruling by the Board, the company announced plans for permanently closing the facility.

Now they’d like the California Public Utility Commission to grant them permission to make consumers pay for the utility’s mistakes.   [Read more…]

Fine Print of Obama’s EPA Rules Reveal Huge Giveaways to Big Coal and Gas

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Obama can’t fight ‘war on coal’ by giving industry $8 billion in government subsidies, say critics.

By Jacob Chamberlain/ Common Dreams

The Environmental Protection Agency announced new regulations for the energy industry on Friday which will limit, for the first time, the amount of carbon that gas- and coal-fired plants can emit into the atmosphere.

And though many of the larger environmental groups in the country welcomed the new restrictions, more critical observers of the EPA announcement argue the rules don’t go far enough in terms of limiting emissions. Meanwhile the Obama administration, in fact, is preparing to use huge amounts of public money to prop up the U.S. coal industry.

Such a scheme, according to one critic, “will make only modest cuts to power plant emissions” at a moment in history when much more dramatic actions are needed.   [Read more…]

How Factory Farms May Be Killing Us

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A report from the CDC reveals the grave dangers of antibiotic resistance and says factory-farmed animals are a big contributor

By Tara Lohan / AlterNet 

What would our healthcare system look like if we couldn’t perform surgeries, administer chemotherapy, replace joints, treat diabetes? It would be the end of modern medicine as we know it. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control warns we could be headed toward that very future.

Antibiotics revolutionized medicine in the 1940s, saving millions of lives over the last 70 years. But during that time bacteria have evolved to become resistant to certain antibiotics. The more antibiotics we use, the quicker resistance builds up. This has deadly repercussions.   [Read more…]

Traffic Impact May Get Some Reform Under Smaller CEQA Bill

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By Robert Cruickshank/California High Speed Rail Blog

One of the dramas at the end of the legislative session last week involved the fate of reform to the California Environmental Quality Act. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg substituted a new bill, SB 743, for his original CEQA reform bill, SB 731. SB 743 is designed to speed approval and construction of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, but it does open the door to a badly-needed reform of one of the worst aspects of CEQA – the rules requiring projects to be evaluated for their impact on the “level of service” (LOS) of roads. This rule has been called “the single greatest promoter of sprawl” in California and has long been a target of sustainability advocates.

As Damien Newton explains, SB 743 begins the process of removing LOS from CEQA, but doesn’t go as far as many advocates had hoped.

It’s a good start, but more will be needed.   [Read more…]

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