The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute. The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world’s population own barely 1% of global wealth. There have of course been many studies of worldwide inequality. But what is new about this report, the authors say, is its coverage. It deals with all countries in the world – either actual data or estimates based on statistical analysis – and it deals with wealth, where most previous research has looked at income. What they mean by wealth in this study is what people own, less what they owe – their debts. The assets include land, buildings, animals and financial assets. Different assets The analysis shows, as have many other less comprehensive studies, striking divergences in wealth between countries. Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and some countries in the Asia Pacific region, such as Japan and Australia. These countries account for 90% of household wealth. The study also finds […]
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WASHINGTON — A Saudi-born man living in Virginia has been identified as the third reported U.S. case of a human form of mad cow disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The man, whose case was reported to the CDC by the Virginia Department of Health, has variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease, or vCJD, the CDC said on its Web site. This is a carefully diagnosed, brain-destroying illness that scientists believe is caused by eating beef products from cattle infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as BSE, or mad cow disease. ‘This U.S. case-patient was most likely infected from contaminated cattle products consumed as a child when living in Saudi Arabia,’ the CDC said in its report, posted on the Internet at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/vcjd/other/vCJD_112906.htm. ‘The current patient has no history of donating blood and the public health investigation has identified no risk of transmission to U.S. residents from this patient.’ BSE swept through British herds in the 1980s, and people began developing an odd, early-onset form of CJD a few years later. CJD normally affects one in a million people globally, usually the elderly, as it has a long incubation period. There […]
WASHINGTON — One in seven Mexican workers have left their country and are working in the United States, an immigration study said on Tuesday. There were more than 7 million workers from Mexico in the U.S. labor force this year, 2 million more than six years ago, said the report’s author, Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Batalova said the increase in numbers had to do with economic reasons, with more immigrants looking for a better life in the United States, but also with the increased enforcement at the U.S.-Mexican border. ‘It became more dangerous to cross the border, and that caused a ‘lock in’ effect,’ Batalova told Reuters in a telephone interview. Up to 9.4 percent of the all persons born in Mexico were living in the United States in 2005, according to the report. In the same year, 14 percent of Mexican workers had jobs on U.S. soil, compared to 2.5 percent of Canadians. Based on data from the Census Bureau 2006 Current Population Survey, Batalova found that Mexicans accounted for nearly one-third of the 22.6 million foreign-born workers in the United States, or almost 5 percent of […]
Dwindling growth in rice harvests in India over recent decades may be due to large atmospheric brown clouds looming over the region, a new study by U. S. scientists published Monday suggests. Atmospheric brown clouds are drifting banks of air pollution that reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface, causing dryer, cooler, and dimmer surface conditions that could adversely affect important food crops. One of the largest of these clouds hovers over the Indian subcontinent, one of the world’s major rice-producing regions. To examine the effects of these clouds on rice harvests, researchers from University of California constructed a model that combines historical Indian rice harvest data with a climate model. They found that historical rice harvests would have been larger in the absence of these clouds, and larger still if reductions in the clouds were accompanied by reductions in greenhouse gases. Contrary to previous concerns that reducing the brown clouds could diminish harvests by unveiling the warming effects of greenhouse gases, these results suggest that reductions in these clouds, alone or in combination with reductions in greenhouse gases, would benefit rice harvests in India, the researchers say. The findings were reported Monday by […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
