Europe at a glance: Drunkest, fattest, laziest countries

Some interesting updated stats on Europe courtesy of the The Washington Post

Alcohol:
Despite common perceptions that the French sip wine all day or that Scandinavians muddle through the long winters with the aid of aquavit, Luxembourg actually tops the list of Europe’s alcohol consumers, with nearly 15.3 liters bought per capita annually — a 12 percent increase since 1980. (The OECD points out, however, that foreigners actually purchase much of that because of Luxembourg’s lower-than-average alcohol taxes.) Not counting Luxembourg, Latvia and Romania top the charts of alcohol consumption among adults:

Meanwhile, the supposed dolce vita of the Italians has become more temperate. They’ve reduced their alcohol consumption by nearly 60 percent since 1980, to a modest 6.9 liters.
And even though higher taxes and more rigid advertising laws have caused alcohol consumption in the E.U. to decline by 15 percent since 1980, the region still has the highest level of alcohol consumption in the world, and alcohol is the third leading risk factor for disease there, after tobacco and high blood pressure.
The problem is that as parts of Europe sober up, other countries have been drinking more — and new types — of alcohol:

There has been a degree of convergence in drinking habits across the European Union, with wine consumption increasing in many traditional beer-drinking countries and vice versa.

Obesity:
The rate of obesity has doubled over the past 20 years in the E.U., to 17 percent, making it a “major public health concern,” the authors write. Hungarians are the most obese people in the E.U., at 28.5 percent, closely followed by Britain.
Hungary’s neighbors, the Romanians, are the most svelte:

The authors note the use of taxes on fat and sugar — such as those recently passed in Finland, France and Hungary — as potential solutions. However, one such measure in Denmark was recently repealed after it was found to have too detrimental of an impact on consumers and businesses.

Physical activity:
Overall, only one in five children in the E.U. member states say they exercise regularly. The study didn’t measure physical activity among adults, but if sedentary children become pudgy grown-ups, the Italians are in trouble. Just 7 percent of girls and 12 percent of boys there reported daily physical activity, while the Austrians were most active:

Source: Washington Post

Health at a Glance Europe 2012

The hidden world of private security contractors in USA

The hidden world of of the Security and Surveillance Industrial complex has attracted the attention of big media in US.

The most complete and updated source of information on this is the Washington Post special investigation website Top Secret America where maps , interactive features and and updated articles explore the hidden business of Security in America.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

The Department of Defence is the authority in charge to oversee those companies but it has declared recently that is overwhelmed by the amount of private companies to control and is unable to keep an eye on all their activities.
According to Democracy Now over 1/3 of USA surveillance and enforcement operations are conducted by private contractors, the surveillance grid established by the National Security Agency intercepts every 24 hours over 1.7 billion personal communications in US only.
E-mails, phone calls, SMS, internet postings all are recorded and disseminated to a wide range of private and public agencies for analysis.
Data is not provided only to big names as Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, Csc, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Blackwater, Saic, but also to a myriad of small and medium businesses which represents 70% of the industry, most of them employ less than 100 employee and are in charge of background checks, fiscal checks, phone and internet wiretapping and data analysis.
It is not only the National Security Agency or police and other governmental agencies contracting their services, more and more private companies such as corporation, banks are contracting their services for employee checks and other intelligence purposes.
Ho safe we are that public data is not being used for private interests? We are unable to say it at this stage given the lack of supervision and tracking of the information.