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 the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds - the oldest boomers […]
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 finance to lead carbon-reduction activities in communities where the cost of doing so is fairly low. However, this has had unintended human rights consequences for vulnerable populations in those communities. For example, there are forestry protection projects in Uganda designed to earn carbon credits, yet those same activities — aimed […]
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 of districts making huge cuts to summer school; they’re just devastating these programs, said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the National Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. ‘It’s having a disproportionate impact on low-income families. The federal stimulus law is channeling $100 billion to public education, and […]
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 is now known to some economists and the more plugged-in corners of the blogosphere as the ‘he-cession. More than 80 percent of job losses in the United States since November have fallen on men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the numbers are broadly similar in Europe, […]
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, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. ‘I […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
