Paul Driessen

Computer models, scare stories and ad hominem rants underscore the alarmists’ desperation.

Al Gore is in full attack mode, employing his ridiculous “Climate Reality Project” to “Draw the Line on Denial,” even as he laid off 90% of the staff at his “Alliance for Climate Protection.” Greenpeace has joined the fray, launching a “Dealing in Doubt” campaign that blames ExxonMobil for funding the “global warming denial machine.”

ClimateProgress.org blogger Joe Romm faithfully echoes “Goreacle” and Greenpeace hysterics and blame-casting. To serve his partisan propaganda, he completely ignores the reality that the climate cataclysm cabal outspends the “deniers” by at least $1,000 to $1; ExxonMobil hasn’t supported skeptic groups for years; and the real Big Oil money has gone to extreme green groups.

Chesapeake Energy alone gave $25 million to the Sierra Club, to advance the radical organization’s anti-coal campaign. That one grant is ten times more money than the Heartland Institute received from all fossil fuel energy companies in its entire 29-year history, notes Heartland president Joseph Bast.

More »

Julie Hyland

Ultimately, the mass impoverishment determined upon by the ruling elite can be implemented only through dictatorial means.

The campaign of vilification and intimidation against the Guardian newspaper for publishing the disclosures of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden is without precedent in a supposedly democratic country.

Raids on newspaper offices, the forced destruction of computer drives and threats to arrest journalists are actions more commonly associated with military dictatorships. But this is exactly what has been meted out against the Guardian, with threats of worse to come.

On Tuesday, a parliamentary debate is scheduled, instigated by Conservative backbencher Julian Smith, on whether the newspaper is guilty of treason for reporting the illegal surveillance programmes operated by the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Smith has already written to the Metropolitan Police calling for the Guardian to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act 2000.

More »

Paola Manduca

Iraq's Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation have published a summary report of ex-post assessment of the prevalence of birth defects, still-births and miscarriages in the country obtained through a household survey. Before publication of the report, I criticised in the British Medical Journal (Rapid responses, September 10, 2013) the design of the survey as inappropriate. Post-publication, clarification of the points I raised was necessary and action to finish the study acquiring historical residence and exposure of the cases should be accepted by the MoH in Baghdad and the WHO, and is feasible. Completing the study with clarifications and these data will show its relevance and pitfalls more clearly.

The study was designed with an inbuilt prejudice of "not wishing to investigate correlation with exposure to depleted uranium"; not very scientific. The MoH-WHO study didn't request information about all environmental exposures and did not consider any other of the complex post-war detritus and situations that could affect reproductive health.

More »