It has been a record physiotherapy day. I did 50 minutes of bike riding and 40 reps of 5 resistance exercises on top of ultrasound, traction and chiropractic. Three hours work which left me with low blood sugars and tired. But all is well. As soon as I am done here, I have a date with an ice pack and my favourite chair!
Huffington Post — Brandon Nichols knows first hand what it's like to get poisoned by mercury.
"I got mercury poisoning two or three times," he told CBC news. "I got some serious headaches."
The University of British Columbia grad student had been in South America, researching small scale gold mining operations in Ecuador and their use of mercury.
Mercury is widely used by the miners because it bonds with gold, allowing it be more easily separated from the ore hauled out of countless mines dotting the countryside.
The widespread use of the toxic liquid metal is creating a long lasting environmental hazard that starts with ore processing and travels all the way up the food chain. But much of it is hidden in remote corners of the developing world so it's receiving little attention.
Click through for more on an environmental catastrophe that we hear little about, but which we can reduce.
Alternet — While U.S. politics has a long history of nasty elections and ugly fights, it is now fair to say that Donald Trump wins the award for the most polarizing and offensive top-ranked candidate in our nation’s history. Put simply, he’s an asshole. And so are his supporters. That story has been covered, so I won’t rehash it here. Instead the question that I want to ask is how his divisive bigotry is affecting the rest of us.
Trump’s politics are not just based on bigotry; they are based on hostility. They are founded on a winner-take-all strategy that characterizes anyone who disagrees with Trump as a loser. It’s a politics of bullying and bluster. But the problem is that bullying becomes the defining political discourse.
Republicans notoriously refer to Obama as a very divisive person, which is a lie in my view. If we measure divisiveness by how often Republicans don't get their own way, then I suppose Obama is divisive, but that is not how it is measured. Obama, although not perfect, tries to put people first which is anathema to Republicans, who delight in building up the rich and corporations. "Divisive asshole" is the perfect name for Trump. And the fact that so many people believe his fearmongering, while the MSM delight in promoting all his bullshit which provided titillation to "the masses", is abhorrent.
Politicususa — The Massachusetts Senator crystallized the issue by calling out Republicans for working for the NRA instead of the people, “If the Republican Party would rather work for the NRA than the American people and if they won’t do their jobs to keep our children safe, then somebody else has to step up.”
“And that’s why I strongly support President Obama’s actions to use the existing laws on the books to reduce background check loopholes, to increase mental health treatment and reporting and to improve enforcement of our gun laws,” she clarified, carefully using the phrase “existing laws on the books” to counter Republican claims that the President doesn’t have this authority.
Go Lizzie!
My Universe —
Bernie Sanders has declared war on the biggest players in Wall Street’s financial sector, saying they are overrun with “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” and criticizing his top rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as being naïve about what needs to happen to create a financial system that “works for all Americans.”
Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good, but I’ll hazard a guess. I expect the U.S. economy to sputter in 2016. That’s because the economy faces a deep structural problem: not enough demand for all the goods and services it’s capable of producing.
