Brain injury, oil leak, Iceland, paying for war, religion, hate, death

Thanks to NRA’s effective lobbying and the support of enlightened hunters, 240,000 people die annually from traumatic brain injury

Bullet's path leaves uncertain future for trauma victims
Giffords will face a long and difficult recovery, but some victims have prevailed

By JoNel Aleccia Health writer
About 1.7 million people in the United States suffer traumatic brain injuries every year, with about 20 percent of them caused by violence, including gunshots. About 52,000 people die as a result of their injuries and about 275,000 are hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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And we put faith in oil industry’s guarantees of no environmental impact in The Tongass National Forest

Alaska pipeline shut down after leak discovered
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, 1/9/2011
Oil producers are in the process of cutting output to 5 percent of the normal rate of around 630,000 barrels per day.
The last time the pipeline was shut down unexpectedly was in May, when a power outage at a pump station triggered a series of events that caused an estimated 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) of crude oil to spill out of the storage tank at Pump Station 9, located about 105 miles south of Fairbanks.
The spill, which shut the pipeline for 79 hours, was the biggest in Alaska since the 212,252-gallon spill in 2006 from a corroded transit pipeline at the Prudhoe Bay field.

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It take little Iceland and not Sweden or Britain to understand the U.S. invasion obscured by rape charges

LONDON – The American ambassador to Reykjavik has been summoned to explain why U.S. investigators are trying to access the private details of an Icelandic lawmaker's online activity as they try to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks
"(It is) very serious that a foreign state, the United States, demands such personal information of an Icelandic person, an elected official," Interior Minister Ogmundur Jonasson told Icelandic broadcaster RUV.
"This is even more serious when put (in) perspective and concerns freedom of speech and people's freedom in general," he added.

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Who pays to keep wars going and who benefits

AFGOYE, Somalia – Dr. Hawa Abdi has treated sick and wounded Somalis since 1983, through famine and civil war. But it only took one day for Islamist rebels to wreck her life's work
She has visited international donors to appeal for money, if only a fraction of the millions the international community spends on military support for the weak, corrupt Somali government. Some Somali expatriates are also trying to help.

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The irrational hold religion has and its impact goes back to the Crusades and the Inquisition and before and continues today in support for wars, social injustice, and in other ways

KARACHI (AFP) – More than 50,000 people rallied in Pakistan's southern city of Karachi on Sunday, police said, against the controversial reform of a blasphemy law that was behind the killing of a senior politician.
Religious groups blocked a main thoroughfare in Karachi's teeming metropolis holding banners in support of the police commando who shot dead Punjab governor Salman Taseer on Tuesday over his views favouring an amendment of the law.

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Collateral damage of hate talk radio/TV/state organized violence, and those who support it

By CARL HULSE and KATE ZERNIKE .
The New York Times

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence. The fallout seemed to hold the potential to upend the effort by Republicans to keep their agenda front and center in the new Congress and to alter the political narrative in other ways.


Dallas Green's granddaughter dies in Arizona shooting
By David Brown

Among the six killed and 13 injured reportedly in Tucson, Ariz. was 9-year-old third-grader Christina-Taylor Green. .
From the portrait painted in the Arizona Daily Star, she seemed like a neat little girl all on her own:
• Already a good speaker, her father said, Green recently was elected to the student council at her elementary school.
• Green told her parents she wanted to attend Penn State and make a career helping those less fortunate.
• She loved animals and dancing — especially ballet — along with hip-hop and jazz music.
• She was athletic, too; Green liked to go swimming with her 11-year-old brother, also named Dallas. She also was the only girl on her Little League baseball team. She played second base.
Green had two personal connections to Major League Baseball; She was a daughter of Los Angeles Dodgers scout John Green and a granddaughter of former Philadelphia Phillies manager Dallas Green.

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Where is the outrage and the grief, the continuing media coverage over destruction/dislocation in Iraq and Afghanistan


9 January 2011

What is the real death toll in Iraq?
The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the ten years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg report
So ten years after Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion of Iraq against the wishes of a majority of UN members, no one knows how many Iraqis have died. We do know that more than two million fled abroad. Another 1.5 million sought safety elsewhere in Iraq. We know that the combined horror of car bombs, suicide attacks, sectarian killing and disproportionate US counter-insurgency tactics and air strikes have produced the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world. But the exact death toll remains a mystery.