On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12-1 to grant preliminarily approval to an ordinance aimed at deterring hospitals from discharging homeless patients to the streets, the Los Angeles Times reports. The measure would permit hospitals to be fined up to $25,000 and charged with misdemeanors for discharging patients anywhere other than their residence without written consent. If the measure receives majority approval from the council next week, it will go before the mayor for final approval. Background Since 2005, the city attorney’s office has investigated more than 50 cases of patient dumping, in which patients are dropped off by a taxi or ambulance, oftentimes on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. City officials said the ordinance was necessary because their efforts to create a state law failed in October 2007, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) vetoed a bill that would have prohibited patient dumping. Because there are no criminal statutes on the practice, Los Angeles prosecutors have relied primarily on civil actions against hospitals suspected of dumping, the Times reports. Opposition Council member Tom LaBonge, the lone dissenter on the ordinance, said he thought the city should not take responsibility […]
With vital and often-distant water sources shrinking, Los Angeles officials today will revive a controversial proposal to recycle wastewater as part of a plan to curb usage and move the city toward greater water independence. The aggressive, multiyear proposal could do much to catch the city up to other Southern California communities that have launched advanced recycling programs. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s effort could cost up to $2 billion and affect a wide range of daily activities. For example, residents would be urged to change their clothes’ washers, and new restrictions would be placed on how and when they could water lawns and clean cars. Financial incentives and building code changes would be used to incorporate high-tech conservation equipment in homes and businesses. Builders would be pushed to install waterless urinals, weather-sensitive sprinkler systems and porous parking lot paving that allows rain to percolate into groundwater supplies. Just to meet a 15% increase in demand by 2030, officials say 32 billion gallons a year will have to be saved or recaptured — enough to cover the San Fernando Valley with a foot of water. Prohibitions during the 1990s drought — banning residents from washing driveways and […]
With the temperature 96 degrees in the shade, veterans of this concrete jungle braced themselves recently as they opened a door to an apartment building roof. But instead of confronting a wall of dry heat, they felt their faces cooled by moist air, carrying a light scent of soil and fresh grass. Tile by tile, workers were laying a new form of ultralight and ultracheap roof garden. With a low-maintenance variety of grass growing in four inches of vermiculite, a mineral substance often used in gardening, this carpet of cooling green weighed only 16 pounds per square foot. ”If a roof is rated to take people, which most are, it can easily take a roof garden,” Takaharu Yoshioka, environmental director of Greenich Garden, a landscape design company, said stepping onto the emerald lawn. ”Last year we did only 50 roof gardens. So far this year we have already had 200 orders.” The realization that Tokyo is becoming a vast ”heat island” is behind the boom in roof gardens. Here, centuries of gradual climate change are telescoping into decades. ”Over the last century, Tokyo temperatures have increased five times as fast as global warming,” said Takehiro Mikami, […]
WASHINGTON - After being pummeled for weeks on Capitol Hill over the president’s budget, Food and Drug Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach has written Congress that the agency needs an immediate infusion of $275 million to ensure that imported foods, drugs and medical devices are safe. The request was made in a letter to Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, that offers a detailed spending plan for such things as opening new foreign offices, increasing inspections and constructing new databases to track drug hazards. Presidential appointees rarely diverge so forcefully from the president’s own spending plans, or at least avoid doing so in writing. Dr. von Eschenbach’s action surprised agency observers and was taken as perhaps a sign of the president’s waning influence in the closing months of his presidency. ‘In 30 years at the agency, I never saw anything like this happen before,’ said William Hubbard, a former deputy F.D.A. commissioner. On May 1, Mr. Specter wrote Dr. von Eschenbach a letter asking the commissioner to detail how much the agency needed ‘to protect the public’s health.’ In a handwritten aside in the letter’s margin, Mr. Specter wrote, ‘Andy, I know the situation is extreme. […]
Like swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano - except with a longer interval (73 years in this case) - the zeppelins are returning to California. Operating out of Moffett Field, near Mountain View at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, Airship Ventures has announced that it has inked a deal with Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH of Germany (the successor of the same firm who made the Hindenburg and the zeppelins that bombed London in World War I) to acquire a modern, 12-passenger zeppelin. The $8 million airship will be sent to California in September, where it will be used mostly for sightseeing excursions. Being much smaller than the passenger zeppelins of the 1920s and 1930s, it will have to cross the Atlantic on the deck of a ship. New zeppelins The airship will be the fourth of the Zeppelin NT line produced by the German firm, which differs considerably from the aerial giants that roamed the skies before they were retired after the fiery crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. First, they lack the rigid hulls of the old-style zeppelins, which housed loose-hanging gas cells. Instead, the gasbag is the hull, and it houses an […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
