Stephan: Another breakdown in our food system. Consider this, and then consider the movement Republicans are backing in state legislatures to make it illegal to photograph animal husbandry operations, and the push at the Federal level to gut the FDA.
Taylor Farms Pacific, Inc., a California-based food supplier for six retail chain stores, has announced the recall of grape tomatoes produced by a grower who said the vegetables might be contaminated with salmonella.
The recall applies to 29 brand-packaged salads sold at Albertson’s, Raley’s, Sam’s Club, Savemart, Signature Cafe and Wal-Mart, the company said in a statement Monday. The affected products have expiration dates ranging from April 27 to May 9, according to the news release.
The recall applies to 13 states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, according to a spreadsheet attached to the news release.
Salmonella is a form of bacteria found in food that can cause serious illness and even death if ingested.
Taylor Farms has urged consumers not to eat these products and to return them to where they were purchased for full refunds.
Taylor Farms said customers with questions should call the company at 209-835-6300 or contact the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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KATIE ZEZIMA, - The New York Times
Stephan: Twenty one to 23 per cent of adult Americans are considered by the government to be illiterate. Now we are losing the ability to read and write cursive. This is just another indication of American decline.
For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.
The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.
Might people who write only by printing – in block letters, or perhaps with a sloppy, squiggly signature – be more at risk for forgery? Is the development of a fine motor skill thwarted by an aversion to cursive handwriting? And what happens when young people who are not familiar with cursive have to read historical documents like the Constitution?
Jimmy Bryant, director of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Central Arkansas, says that a connection to archival material is lost when students turn away from cursive. While teaching last year, Mr. Bryant, on a whim, asked students to raise their hands if they wrote in cursive as a way to communicate. None did.
That cursive-challenged class included Alex Heck, 22, who said she barely remembered how to read or write […]
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ANN PIETRANGELO, - Care2/Pediatric Academic Societies
Stephan: The next time you hear someone -- usually a Republican -- say 'We have the best healthcare and the world,' think about this. This is what the Illness Profit System has reduced us to.
Kids are getting shortchanged on medical care due to cost. Even among parents who have insurance, the high cost of health care is keeping them from taking their children to the doctor, according to a new study.
For this study, researchers wanted to see what affects a family’s decision to put off or go without medical care. They included the cost of health care in relation to the family’s income, and having a child with physical, social, behavioral, or cognitive limitations.
Families with health insurance are not immune to the rising costs of health care, and still face the burdens of premiums, deductibles, and co-pays.
The study was led by Lauren E. Wisk, a doctoral student and graduate research assistant in the School of Medicine and Public Health at University of Wisconsin, Madison, who examined data from 6,273 families with at least one child.
‘It Costs Too Much to be Healthy
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Stephan: We have the most ideological and activist Supreme Court in generations. They are slowly but steadily reorienting American law to favor corporations.
One of the reasons the class action lawsuit is such an effective tool at stemming corporate overreach is that it forces guilty parties to bear the consequences of their bad business decisions en masse. A gentle fleecing of one customer for $40 a year may not seem like a big deal until tens of thousands of fleeced customers are able to aggregate their claims and place an overarching cost to the bad practice.
But thanks to the Roberts Court, businesses have much less to fear from the class action lawsuit. That’s because, according to the holding in AT&T v. Conception, companies should be free to ban class actions in the fine print of their contracts.
The 5-4 ruling, authored by Justice Scalia, holds that corporations may use arbitration clauses to cut off consumers and employees’ right to band together through class actions to hold corporations accountable.
The decision is the most recent in a series of systematic efforts to roll back consumer protections and class action rights. In Concepcion, a cell phone customer claimed that AT&T’s contract promising a free phone did not mention a $30.22 sales tax charge. The customer sued, but AT&T argued the suit customer’s claim was barred by the […]
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Stephan: If this is how much progress is being made with the funding now allocated, imagine where we would be if we had put the trilllion and a half we squandered on endless war into alternative energy development. The Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld neocon policies set in motion an entire sequence of disasters with which we are still living.
Thanks to Damiem Broderick, PhD.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 29, 2011 – With the creation of a 3-D nanocone-based solar cell platform, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jun Xu has boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by nearly 80 percent.
The technology substantially overcomes the problem of poor transport of charges generated by solar photons. These charges - negative electrons and positive holes - typically become trapped by defects in bulk materials and their interfaces and degrade performance.
‘To solve the entrapment problems that reduce solar cell efficiency, we created a nanocone-based solar cell, invented methods to synthesize these cells and demonstrated improved charge collection efficiency,
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