President Barack Obama is poised to offer an olive branch to Cuba in an effort to repair the US’s tattered reputation in Latin America. The White House has moved to ease some travel and trade restrictions as a cautious first step towards better ties with Havana, raising hopes of an eventual lifting of the four-decade-old economic embargo. Several Bush-era controls are expected to be relaxed in the run-up to next month’s Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago to gild the president’s regional debut and signal a new era of ‘Yankee’ cooperation. The administration has moved to ease draconian travel controls and lift limits on cash remittances that Cuban-Americans can send to the island, a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of families. ‘The effect on ordinary Cubans will be fairly significant. It will improve things and be very welcome,’ said a western diplomat in Havana. The changes would reverse hardline Bush policies but not fundamentally alter relations between the superpower and the island, he added. ‘It just takes us back to the 1990s.’ The provisions are contained in a $410bn (ã290bn) spending bill due to be voted on this week. The legislation would allow Americans […]
WASHINGTON — The U.S. healthcare system is pinched by a persistent nursing shortage that threatens the quality of patient care even as tens of thousands of people are turned away from nursing schools, according to experts. The shortage has drawn the attention of President Barack Obama. During a White House meeting on Thursday to promote his promised healthcare system overhaul, Obama expressed alarm over the notion that the United States might have to import trained foreign nurses because so many U.S. nursing jobs are unfilled. Democratic U.S. Representative Lois Capps, a former school nurse, said meaningful healthcare overhaul cannot occur without fixing the nursing shortage. ‘Nurses deliver healthcare,’ Capps said in a telephone interview. An estimated 116,000 registered nurse positions are unfilled at U.S. hospitals and nearly 100,000 jobs go vacant in nursing homes, experts said. The shortage is expected to worsen in coming years as the 78 million people in the post-World War Two baby boom generation begin to hit retirement age. An aging population requires more care for chronic illnesses and at nursing homes. ‘The nursing shortage is not driven by a lack of interest in nursing careers. The bottleneck is at the […]
Americans set their clocks ahead by an hour this weekend, as daylight saving time begins Sunday. ‘Springing forward’ creates another hour of sunlight in the evening. It also has some effects on health and public safety that many people are unaware of. Interesting facts about daylight saving time include: 1. Officially, it’s ‘daylight saving time,’ not ‘daylight savings time.’ But don’t feel bad if you thought there was a final ‘s’ on ‘saving’; far more people Google the incorrect phrase than the correct one. 2. Daylight saving time has mixed effects on people’s health. Transitions into and out of DST can disturb people’s sleeping patterns, for example, and make them more restless at night. Night owls tend to be more bothered by the time changes than people who like mornings, Finnish researchers concluded last year. 3. There’s a spike in heart attacks during the first week of daylight saving time, according to another study published last year. The loss of an hour’s sleep may make people more susceptible to an attack, some experts say. When daylight saving time ends in the fall, heart attacks briefly become less frequent than usual. 4. People are safer drivers during […]
If you’ve read anything about the global water crisis, you’ve likely read a quote from Dr. Peter Gleick, founder and president of the Pacific Institute, and one of the world’s leading water experts. His name has become as ubiquitous as drought itself, which is suddenly making major headlines. A report from the World Economic Forum warned that in only twenty years our civilization may be facing ‘water bankruptcy’–shortfalls of fresh water so large and pervasive that global food production could crater, meaning that we’d lose the equivalent of the entire grain production of the US and India combined. But we don’t have to wait twenty years to see what this would look like. Australia, reeling from twelve years of drought in the Murray-Darling River Basin, has seen agriculture grind to a halt, with tens of billions of dollars in losses. The region has been rendered a tinderbox, with the deadliest fires in the country’s history claiming over 160 lives so far. And all this may begin to hit closer to home soon. California’s water manager said that the state is bracing for its worst drought in modern history. Stephen Chu, the new US secretary of energy, warns that the […]
A proposed bill promising major changes in the U.S. abortion landscape has Roman Catholic bishops threatening to close Catholic hospitals if the Democratic Congress and White House make it law. The Freedom of Choice Act failed to get out of subcommittee in 2004, but its sponsor is poised to refile it now that former Senate co-sponsor Barack Obama occupies the Oval Office. A spokesman for Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the legislation ‘is among the congressman’s priorities. We expect to reintroduce it sooner rather than later.’ FOCA, as the bill is known, would make federal law out of the abortion protections established in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling. The legislation has some Roman Catholic bishops threatening to shutter the country’s 624 Catholic hospitals - including 11 in the Archdiocese of St. Louis - rather than comply. Speaking in Baltimore in November at the bishops’ fall meeting, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, a Chicago auxiliary bishop, took up the issue of what to do with Catholic hospitals if FOCA became law. ‘It would not be sufficient to withdraw our sponsorship or to sell them to someone who would perform abortions,’ he said. ‘That […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
