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| Friday, 03 July 2009 |
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Consumer Groups Out-lobbied On Healthcare |
| If you don't speak out about ending the reign of the illness profit industry, replacing it with genuine health care, then you have no right to whine about the costs when they drive you into bankruptcy at worst, or sleepless nights of stress at best. |
| FOON RHEE, deputy national political editor - Boston Globe |
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President Obama has been urging the public to speak out on healthcare, warning that if they don't, their voices will be drowned out by special interests. A watchdog group today put some numbers behind that admonition, reporting that health industry groups are vastly outspending consumer groups in lobbying Washington. The Center for Responsive Politics says that consumer groups that favor Obama's proposals, including a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, are being "decidedly outspent and out-lobbied by drug manufacturers, insurers, HMOs, and doctors' associations." In the first three months of 2009, the US Chamber of Commerce, which has spent more money on lobbying since 1998 than any other group, and the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America paid lobbyists a combined $22.5 million to promote their interests. In contrast, Families USA, a consumer group on healthcare has spent $10,000 on lobbying this year after ... |
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Federal Stimulus Money to Fund Restoration of Coral Reefs |
| Some important good news. |
| CAMMY CLARK - Miami Herald |
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MIAMI -- An underwater nursery project to restore the struggling coral reefs along Florida's southern coast and the U.S. Virgin Islands will receive $3.3 million in national stimulus funding, according to an announcement Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The nonprofit Nature Conservancy will oversee the project, which expands four existing nurseries of staghorn and elkhorn coral and establishes two new nurseries. Over the next three years, about 12,000 corals will be grown to enhance coral populations at 34 degraded reefs from the Dry Tortugas - 70 miles west of Key West - to the waters off Broward County. The stimulus money pays for most of the salaries of 57 positions needed for the project. Staghorn and elkhorn, which have been designated national threatened species, have suffered from coral bleaching due to warming sea temperatures, diseases, hurricane damage and other threats. But in good conditions, these ... |
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The Case of the Shrinking Sheep |
| It is in little observations like this that we begin to see the deep changes that are afoot. |
| KENNETH CHANG - The New York Times |
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On a remote Scottish island, the sheep are shrinking, and the cause appears to be the warming of winter. The wild Soay sheep that live on the island of Hirta in the North Atlantic have been under careful scientific observation since 1985, partly because the island ecosystem is a simple one consisting of the sheep and the vegetation they eat. Timothy Coulson, a professor of population biology at Imperial College London, and his colleagues analyzed the sheep data and found that the weight of the average female Soay has slimmed about three ounces a year, or about 5 percent over the past quarter-century. That was somewhat surprising as larger sheep have better odds of surviving, and evolution tends to favor those that are stronger. But thanks to changing climate, the survival of the fittest has become a bit easier, enabling more of the less fit to ... |
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Tiny New Battery Is Printable |
| Live Science |
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A new battery, small and thin, weighs almost nothing and can be printed in a process similar to silk-screening shirts. The printable battery is expected to be cheap and easy to mass produce and could be used in disposable receipts or cards, engineers in Germany announced today. "Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each," said Andreas Willert, of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS, where Reinhard Baumann led the battery's development. The battery weighs less than 1 gram and is less than 1 millimeter thick. It runs at 1.5 volts. Placing several in a row can produce up to 6 volts. A standard AAA battery weighs about 11.5 grams and also runs at 1.5 volts. The newly developed battery has a life span more limited than traditional batteries, however. ... |
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| Thursday, 02 July 2009 |
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Obesity Rates Rising, Mississippi's Still Fattest |
| Obsesity, ignorance, and religious fundamentalism increasingly seems to define a growing percentage of our population. It is also worth noting that obesity rates also correlate closely with those who define themselves as conservative Republicans. We are watching a slow motion tragedy play out. |
| LAURAN NEERGAARD - The Associated Press |
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WASHINGTON -- Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline. "The obesity epidemic clearly goes beyond being an individual problem," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group. It's a national crisis that "calls for a national strategy to combat obesity," added Robert Wood Johnson vice president Dr. James Marks. "The crest of the wave of obesity is still to crash." While ... |
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Ant Mega-colony Takes Over World |
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Considerable research is now emerging that large insect colonies, schools of fish, flights of birds, function under certain circumstances as one integrated organism, connected not just in space time but nonlocally. This report, while acknowledging the observed reality, fails to make this connection. In fact, this may be the most extreme example of nonlocal linkage within a single species we have ever seen. Thanks to Larry Dossey, MD. |
| MATT WALKER, Editor, Earth News - BBC News (U.K.) |
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A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants ( Linepithema humile ) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops. In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the ... |
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The Nexus of Climate Change and Human Rights |
| Ryan Schuchard is manager of environmental research and innovation and Nicki Weston is associate of human rights research and innovation at Business for Social Responsibility. |
| RYAN SCHUCHARD and NICKI WESTON - Reuters |
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Though climate change and human rights are important corporate responsibility issues on their own terms, they are increasingly interrelated. As our global climate destabilizes, there will be an increase in water stress, food scarcity, the prevalence and intensity of diseases, and the loss of homelands and jobs around the world. In turn, climate change is likely to affect several rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), such as the right to life and security, the right to food, and the right to health. Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate climate change are creating new human rights problems. In particular, industrializing countries like China are concerned that regulation may unjustly hamper their economic rights by preventing them from growing. (Indeed, finding common ground on this issue is largely what developing a post-Kyoto global treaty depends on.) Another challenge is that most mitigation scenarios rely on using global ... |
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Facing Deficits, Some States Cut Summer School |
| SAM DILLON - The New York Times |
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COCOA, Fla. -- A year ago, the Brevard County Schools ran a robust summer program here, with dozens of schools bustling with teachers and some 14,000 children practicing multiplication, reading Harry Potter and studying Spanish verbs, all at no cost to parents. But this year Florida's budget crisis has gutted summer school. Brevard classrooms are shuttered, and students like 11-year-old Uvenka Jean-Baptiste, whose mother works in a nursing home, are spending their summer days at home, surfing television channels or loitering at a mall. Nearly every school system in Florida has eviscerated or eliminated summer school this year, and officials are reporting sweeping cuts in states from North Carolina and Delaware to California and Washington. The cuts have come as states across the country are struggling to approve budgets, and California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared a fiscal state of emergency on Wednesday. 'We're seeing a disturbing trend ... |
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| Wednesday, 01 July 2009 |
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Home Prices Post 18.1 Percent Annual Drop in April |
| J.W. ELPHINSTONE - The Associated Press |
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NEW YORK -- Newfound signs of stability in the housing market could still be threatened by rising foreclosures and slow efforts to stop them, according to two reports released Tuesday. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index of 20 major cities showed the smallest monthly decline since June 2008. The index tumbled by 18 percent in April from the year before, but for the third month in a row it was not a record decline. Yearly losses in 13 metros improved compared to March. "It seems that some stabilization may be appearing in some of the regions," said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the S&P index committee. But rising foreclosures fueled by layoffs could derail a meaningful turnaround. The number of homeowners at least two months behind or in foreclosure jumped in the first quarter from the previous quarter, a Treasury Department report said Tuesday. Defaults from borrowers ... |
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Vegetarians 'Avoid More Cancers' |
| BBC News (U.K.) |
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Vegetarians are generally less likely than meat eaters to develop cancer but this does not apply to all forms of the disease, a major study has found. The study involving 60,000 people found those who followed a vegetarian diet developed notably fewer cancers of the blood, bladder and stomach. But the apparently protective effect of vegetarian did not seem to stretch to bowel cancer, a major killer. The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer. Researchers from universities in the UK and New Zealand followed 61,566 British men and women. They included meat-eaters, those who ate fish but not meat, and those who ate neither meat nor fish. VEGETARIANS GOT NOTABLY FEWER OF THESE CANCERS: # Stomach # Bladder # Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma # Multiple myeloma Overall, their results suggested that while in the general population about 33 people in 100 will ... |
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Priced to Sell - Is Free the Future? |
| MALCOLM GLADWELL - The New Yorker |
| At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he'd just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper's content to the Kindle, Amazon's new electronic reader. 'They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. 'I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper's contribution so little, ... |
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The Death of Macho |
| REIHAN SALAM - Foreign Policy |
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Manly men have been running the world forever. But the Great Recession is changing all that, and it will alter the course of history. The era of male dominance is coming to an end. Seriously. For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men's club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe. The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look. Consider, to start, the almost unbelievably disproportionate impact that the current crisis is having on men-so much so that the recession ... |
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