The debate over a tax on sugary soft drinks - billed as a way to fight obesity and provide billions for health care reform - is starting to fizz over. President Obama has said it is worth considering. The chief executive of Coca-Cola calls the idea outrageous, while skeptics point to political obstacles and question how much of an impact it would really have on consumers. But a team of prominent doctors, scientists and policy makers says it could be a powerful weapon in efforts to reduce obesity, in the same way that cigarette taxes have helped curb smoking. The group, which includes the New York City health commissioner, Thomas Farley, and Joseph W. Thompson, Arkansas surgeon general, estimates that a tax of a penny an ounce on sugary beverages would raise $14.9 billion in its first year, which could be spent on health care initiatives. The tax would apply to soft drinks, energy drinks, sports beverages and many juices and iced teas - but not sugar-free diet drinks. The group’s review of research on the topic, appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine, was released on Wednesday, the same day that Senator Max Baucus, […]
Chief executives of Germany’s major energy suppliers usually don’t have much time for their junior counterpart, Lichtblick. The Hamburg-based green-electricity provider’s half a million customers may be ‘impressive,’ they say, but Lichtblick works in a niche market and is no competition for the larger companies in the industry. But things may be about to change. In the next couple of days, the relatively small company is due to reveal a new business model that could shake up the energy market quite a bit-and not only in Germany. So, despite the fact that they currently have large power plants and considerable power over the market, things may soon turn a little less comfortable for energy giants like E.on (EONGn.DE) and RWE (RWEG.DE). Lichtblick-the name translates as ‘glimmer of hope’-is no longer content with distributing eco-friendly gas and electricity. Ten years after entering the market, the group wants to take a shot at the electricity-generation business as well-and to do so while collaborating with a unusual partner on a completely new idea. Unlike Germany’s well-established energy giants, the Hamburg-based company isn’t planning to build a few colossal wind farms or solar-panel systems. Instead, it wants hundreds of thousands of […]
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affair, a conservative public policy research organization commissioned a study aimed at determining the level of basic civics knowledge of Oklahoma High School students. To their dismay the study revealed that only 23% of students knew that our first President was George Washington and only 2.8% of the students scored well enough on the test to be eligible for US citizenship. The study was done by Strategic Visions on behalf of the Council. They took ten questions randomly selected from the one hundred used by US Citizenship and Immigration Services to test applicants for citizenship. To become citizens, applicants have to get six out of ten correct. Here are the questions and results. Question Percentage of Correct Answers […]
WASHINGTON — Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday. ‘We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,’ Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters. Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage. The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats’ efforts to reform the nation’s $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs. President Barack Obama’s has made the overhaul a top domestic policy priority, but his plan has been besieged by critics and slowed by intense political battles in Congress, with the insurance and healthcare industries fighting some parts of the plan. The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians […]
U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs tend to have higher rates of teen pregnancy according to a new study in the journal Reproductive Health. The likely reason, according to the researchers, is that teens in religious communities are less likely to use contraception, as the primary education received is that of abstinence. In the survey, religiosity was defined by the percentage of positive answers to an eight-question survey issued to over 35,000 participants across the United States. Data was aggregated by state, and the overall population in states that agreed with over 70% of the questions posed was considered ‘very religious. The states with the highest scores had more teen births and fewer abortions. The majority of the states with high birth rates, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, were Southern States, including Mississippi with the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. Southern states have earned the nickname ‘Bible Belt because of its conservative Evangelical Protestant views, primarily of the Baptist faith. Statistically, over 80% of Evangelical Christians believe that it is morally wrong for unmarried people to engage in sexual intercourse, compared with around 30% of the general population. Evangelical Christians […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
