WASHINGTON – Workers won’t find much comfort in the smallest increase in health insurance premiums since 1999. The 7.7 percent increase this year was still more than twice the rate of inflation. ‘To working people and business owners, a reduction in an already very high rate of increase just means you’re still paying more,’ said Dr. Drew Altman, president and chief executive officer of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research organization that annually tracks the cost of health insurance. Altman said the rising gap between premium growth and wages is particularly startling when one takes a longer look back. Since 2000, health insurance premiums have gone up 78 percent; wages 20 percent. ‘Yes, the rate of increase is down, but I don’t think anybody is celebrating,’ Altman said of this year’s numbers. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s findings are based on a telephone survey of 3,159 randomly selected private and public employers. More that 155 million Americans get their health insurance through their jobs. Employers on average pick up 84 percent of the cost for individuals and 73 percent for families. The rising cost of health insurance is one reason that employers […]
A hundred years ago, one of the most ambitious of research projects was launched, a study that linked scholars and mediums on three continents. Its purpose was to discover whether living humans could talk to dead ones. Newspapers described the work as ‘remarkable experiments testing the reality of life after death.’ The scholars involved included William James, the famed American psychologist and philosopher, and Oliver Lodge, the British physicist and radio pioneer. They saw evidence for the supernatural - in this world and perhaps the next. ADVERTISEMENT In one instance they made a request to an American medium while she was in a trance. The request was in Latin, a language the medium did not speak. The instructions included a proposal that she ‘send’ a symbol to a British medium. During her next trance session, the American began asking about whether an ‘arrow’ had been received. Later, comparing notes, the researchers discovered that during the American’s first trance, the English psychic had suddenly begun scribbling arrows. It was only after a series of similar, equally unexpected results that the researchers published their findings. Could any study produce results more provocative, more worth pursuing - more forgotten - […]
BEJING — The remains of a 3-year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago were unearthed in Ethiopia Wednesday. This is the earliest known child discovered so far and could fill a critical missing link in evolution. The girl has been named ‘Selam,’ which means peace in Ethiopia’s languages. She belongs to the ‘Australopithecus afarensis’ species and blurs the line between apes and humans. She has also been nicknamed ‘little Lucy,’ after the famous adult female ‘Lucy’ of the same species discovered just 4 kms away in 1974, a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity. The fossil, including an entire skull, torso, shoulder blade and various limbs, was discovered at Dikaka, some 400 kms northeast of the capital Addis Ababa near the Awash River in the Rift Valley. ‘The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world,’ Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the Paleoanthropological Research Team, told a news conference. The fossil reveals a critical moment in human evolution that saw our earliest relatives shaking off the legacy of ape ancestors to take their first tentative steps along a path that ultimately led to modern humans. The skeleton’s […]
WASHINGTON — A growing number of state and local officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines in the November elections. Less than two months before voters head to the polls, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland this week became the most recent official to raise concerns publicly. Mr. Ehrlich, a Republican, said he lacked confidence in the state’s new $106 million electronic voting system and suggested a return to paper ballots. Dozens of states have adopted electronic voting technology to comply with federal legislation in 2002 intended to phase out old-fashioned lever and punch-card machines after the ‘hanging chads’ confusion of the 2000 presidential election. But some election officials and voting experts say they fear that the new technology may have only swapped old problems for newer, more complicated ones. Their concerns became more urgent after widespread problems with the new technology were reported this year in primaries in Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland and elsewhere. This year, about one-third of all precincts nationwide are using the electronic voting technology for the first time, raising the chance of problems […]
WASHINGTON — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document. The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled ‘Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. An opening section of the report, ‘Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,’ cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. The report ‘says that the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
