REYKJAVIK — Iceland’s president accused European countries on Sunday of having bullied it into agreeing to guarantee repayment of the debts of a failed bank, reviving a dispute with Britain and the Netherlands whose citizens are owed billions.

When Iceland’s banking sector collapsed in the 2008 global financial crisis, accounts were frozen at the bank Landsbanki, which had accepted deposits from British and Dutch savers through online funds called Icesave.

Iceland says the estate of the failed bank will be enough to repay about $5 billion of debt to the British and the Dutch. The two countries had wanted the government in Reykjavik to give a state guarantee to the repayment.

In a referendum earlier this year, Icelanders rejected for a second time giving a guarantee.

‘People (in the government) bowed to the bullying of the Europeans …,’ President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson told RUV public radio. He said the British and Dutch demand that the government guarantee the debt had been ‘absurd.’

‘So, what is happening now is proving that if the issue had been handled sensibly here from the beginning, it would have been totally unnecessary to put the people of Iceland and our cooperation with Europe into this straightjacket,’ he said.

‘The EU should […]

No Comments

Approximately half of all American adults with suffer some kind of mental illness during their lifetime, a CDC reports announced. The authors stress the need for better surveillance in order to improve treatment and prevention.

It is important to point out that the authors are referring to a mental illness occurence during a person’s lifetime. This does not mean that half of all Americans have a mental illness at the moment.

Ileana Arias, Ph.D., principle deputy director of CDC, said:

‘We know that mental illness is an important public health problem in itself and is also associated with chronic medical diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. The report’s findings indicate that we need to expand surveillance activities that monitor levels of mental illness in the United States in order to strengthen our prevention efforts.’

According to a SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) study carried out in 2009, 4.8% of America’s adult population – 11 million people – had suffered a mental illness during the preceding twelve months. They define a mental illness as ‘a diagnosable mental disorder (that) has substantially interfered with, or limited one or more major life activities.’

This study reports that over […]

No Comments

The minimum summertime volume of Arctic sea ice fell to a record low last year, researchers said in a study to be published shortly, suggesting that thinning of the ice had outweighed a recovery in area.

The study estimated that last year broke the previous, 2007 record for the minimum volume of ice, which is calculated from a combination of sea ice area and thickness.

The research adds to a picture of rapid climate change at the top of the world that could see the Arctic Ocean ice-free within decades, spurring new oil exploration opportunities but possibly also disrupted weather patterns far afield and a faster rise in sea levels.

The authors developed a model predicting thickness across the Arctic Ocean based on actual observations of winds, air and ocean temperatures.

‘The real worrisome fact is downward trend over the last 32 years,’ said Axel Schweiger, lead author of the paper, referring to a satellite record of changes in the Arctic.

He was emailing Reuters at the Greenpeace icebreaker Arctic Sunrise, in the Arctic Ocean between the Norwegian island of Svalbard and the North Pole.

‘(It fell) by a large enough margin to establish a statistically significant new record,’ said the authors in their paper titled […]

No Comments

Over the past century, the institution of marriage has undergone a tremendous transformation in America — especially when it comes to African-Americans. Over the last half century, marriage rates in the black community have dwindled. Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to remain unmarried for their entire lives, and when they do marry they’re more likely than any other group to marry men with lower incomes, and less education, than their own.

Although, at first glance, this trend seems like a testament to the successes of feminism, Ralph Richard Banks, the author of the new book, ‘Is Marriage for White People?’, argues that it represents a disturbing shift in the landscape of African-American intimacy. Banks, a professor of law at Stanford University, uses detailed interviews and extensive statistical research to argue that this gender and racial imbalance has dire implications for both child-rearing and the long-term happiness of African-American women. In the process, he makes provocative claims about both the importance of marriage and the reasons for its decline — claims that are sure to inflame opinion in a number of circles.

Salon spoke to Banks over the phone about the drug war’s role in this […]

No Comments

In a summer where brush fires have become a near-daily occurrence, firefighting officials said the multiple wildfires that raged across Central Texas on Sunday were the worst the region has seen all year.

Numerous wind-driven fires pushed fire departments to their limits and forced evacuations in Bastrop County, the Steiner Ranch subdivision, Pflugerville, Spicewood and other areas. Scores of residents were left wondering whether they had homes to return to as many of the fires continued to burn Sunday night.

The largest and most destructive fire was in Bastrop County, where a blaze burned 14,000 acres and grew to an estimated 16 miles long by the end of the day, said Mark Stanford, fire chief of the Texas Forest Service.

‘It’s catastrophic,’ Stanford said of the Bastrop County fire. ‘It’s a major natural disaster.’

Forest Service spokeswoman Lexi Maxwell said that fire began about 2 p.m. in the Circle D subdivision off Texas 71. It merged with another fire north of there that pushed south and crossed over Texas 21 and Texas 71, Maxwell said. Aerial units estimated that at least 300 homes had been damaged or destroyed by the fire.

Maxwell said another, unrelated fire was reported in the Colony subdivision in Bastrop County, […]

No Comments