Researchers look past biology in quest

to uncover causes of early puberty
   more »

Keywords: preteen, sexuality, culture, tween

Methamphetamine was around for decades before a resurgence in the 1980s originated on the West Coast and swept across the country, taking firmest hold in poor rural areas.

More than 5 percent of Americans aged 12 or older have used meth at least once, according to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Experts have argued that lawmakers have been slow to react. Slower still have been the filmmakers and writers of Los Angeles and New York.

"If (prevalent meth use) had been going on in Westchester County, New York, or Bethesda, Maryland, methamphetamine would have been a national priority 15 years ago."   more »

“I categorically denounce any statement,” Obama proclaims, “that disparages our great country.

is a little too over the top even for the audacious Obama, who takes special delight in saying remarkably reactionary things even while pandering to the left.

It carries extremist rightward and nationalist implications that ought to send a chill down the spines of anyone who wishes to see the rescue and expansion of a democratic political culture in a nation that has been slipping further and further into a form of what the prolific left political analyst Charles Derber calls "Fascism Lite."   more »

To say so out loud would be an offence against American optimism, but the unspoken truth is that the good old days are gone, probably for a very long while.

Like its predecessors, this particular financial meltdown has brought fear verging on panic. The difference, however, is that it is destroying not only wealth. It is also destroying illusions.

The US has long inhabited a world of make-believe – of a war that demands no sacrifice, of a consumer boom that demands no payment, of a power and prosperity that seemed America's birthright, whatever events in the real world.

Now those fantasies are yielding to the truism coined by Herb Stein, a top White House economic adviser in the 1970s. If something can't go on for ever, it won't.   more »

We now have a global business system that is virtually unregulated, with trade unions crippled and politicians largely bought by the super-rich to serve their interests.

And what is the result? Inequality has returned to 1920s levels, and movement between the classes has collapsed.

We have bank runs unseen in a century. And now even senior Wall Street figures mutter – with only a hint of hyperbole – about a looming Depression and "the worst crisis since 1929".

All we need now is rising unemployment and Zelda and F Scott Fitzgerald boozily waltzing through Wall Street, and we are back where this story began.

The sub-prime mortgage collapse that started the stock market tremors was entirely and exclusively the child of the deregulation mania.   more »