Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Stephan: The measure of a society's integrity and morality is how it treats its children. Keep that in mind as you read this report, and vote accordingly. Our political debate focuses almost entirely on issues without substance. Why don't we care about the children?
MIAMI — As her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown Miami, talking about her economic struggles and loss of faith in the U.S. political system, 3-year-old Aeisha Touray blurted out what sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
‘How dare you!’ the girl said abruptly as she nudged a toy car across a conference room table at the Chapman Partnership shelter in Miami’s tough and predominantly black Overtown neighborhood.
There was no telling what Aeisha was thinking as her 32-year-old mother, Nairkahe Touray, spoke of how she burned through her savings and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier this year.
But how dare you indeed? How does anyone explain to kids like Aeisha and countless others how they wound up homeless in the world’s richest nation?
In a report issued earlier this month, the National Center on Family Homelessness, based in Needham, Massachusetts, said 1.6 million children were living on the streets of the United States last year or in shelters, motels and doubled-up with other families.
That marked a 38 percent jump in child homelessness since 2007 and Ellen Bassuk, the center’s president, attributes the increase to fallout from the […]
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
SHARON GUYNUP, - AlterNet
Stephan: I don't understand the Republican Party. By that I mean I understand the corruption of money in our Federal and state political systems. I understand Senators and Representatives spend 75 per cent of their time -- I mean that literally -- trading money for obligation. I understand the greed. Just recall the increase in Congressional wealth story I ran in SR the other day. That's pretty straightforward. What is harder to understand is selling yourself for things that place your own health, and the health of your children, at risk. And yet history is replete with the stories of cultures who destroyed themselves in just this way.
WASHINGTON, DC — This year, residents of Midland, Texas sued Dow Chemical for dangerous levels of hexavalent chromium in their drinking water. Chromium-6 is a cancer-causing chemical made infamous by Julia Roberts’ film, ‘Erin Brockovich.’ There are currently no drinking water standards for chromium-6, and the chemical industry is delaying a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency assessment labeling it a potent carcinogen.
This is far from an isolated scenario, threats to the public drinking water supply are national in scope. From the 1950s to the 1980s, trichloroethylene, a carcinogenic metal degreaser, lurked, undetected, in the drinking water at North Carolina’s Fort Lejeune — affecting up to one million marines and their families.
California’s San Joaquin River and San Francisco Bay Delta are contaminated with selenium and mercury.
Atrazine, an agricultural weedkiller, frequently pollutes groundwater across the Midwest corn-belt.
Las Vegas tap water contains radium.
Across Florida, pesticides taint a public water system serving nearly 10 million people.
And in the Northeast, millions living along New York’s Hudson River and New Jersey’s Passaic River struggle with the industrial legacy of toxic PCB and dioxin pollution.
Americans overwhelmingly want such problems solved. Safe drinking water was of serious concern to 84 percent of respondents in a recent Gallup […]
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
JUSTIN GILLIS, - The New York Times
Stephan: This is an extraordinary example of willful ignorance, on a par with Creationism. It is also another example of working against one's own interest, in the interest of ideology, theology, and corruption. It is really quite breathtaking, if you think about it.
At the end of one of the most bizarre weather years in American history, climate research stands at a crossroads.
Scientists say they could, in theory, do a much better job of answering the question ‘Did global warming have anything to do with it?
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
Stephan: No one should be surprised by this. It is the consequence of social policies which make no allowance for fundamental human needs; that see no benefit to collective social awareness. That have no sense that wellness should be a national priority.
American women get on average 3 months of maternity leave. Then the disappear from their child's life to a significant degree when they go back to work. The research on this is pretty straightforward. Mothers who are supported in focusing on their children, have healthier children. Prenatal care, and post-natal maternity support, works better and is cheaper. Why don't we do it? Because there is a large part of the population who believe government should neither provide nor support a social safety net. This failure of social and individual wellness is the inevitable result.
Tots who have a poor relationship with their moms are more likely to be obese by the time they turn 15, a new study shows.
So just how does a toddler’s less-than-stellar relationship with mom affect risk for being obese as a teen?
The reasons are not fully understood, but study researchers suggest these toddlers, when coping with stress, may begin to use food as a source of comfort in place of mom at a very early age. The findings appear in the January 2012 issue of Pediatrics.
One thing, however, is clear: Childhood obesity rates in the U.S. are getting higher. As it stands, about 1 in 3 children in the U.S. are overweight or obese and this includes pre-schoolers. This suggests that whatever is causing the uptick starts pretty early.
Relationship With Mom May Play Role in Childhood Obesity
Researchers analyzed close to 1,000 toddlers’ emotional bonds with their moms at 15 months, 2, and 3 years of age. They measured mom’s sensitivity during 15-minute videotaped play sessions. Maternal sensitivity refers to a mother’s ability to know what her child is feeling and respond with comfort, consistency, and warmth.
The researchers also looked for signs of ‘secure attachment’ among toddlers. This means that an […]
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Wednesday, December 28th, 2011
, - Agence France-Presse (France)
Stephan: Here is the latest evidence for the greatest geopolitical shift in a century. If you are 40 or older most of your life has been lived in the bipolar geopolitical reality of the Soviet Union and the United States. A perspective that, after the fall of the USSR, evolved into Bush-Cheney American Triumphalism. Now we are living in the emerging multipolar geopolitical reality in which, for the first time in 500 years, the world will not be organized on Atlantic Caucasian values. At the same time the U.S. is becoming a multi-minority society in which Whites are no longer the majority.
This reality, hardly ever discussed directly, is one of the motivating impulses behind the Tea Party and the Right Wing hysteria over immigration
Brazil has overtaken Britain as the world’s sixth largest economy, a London-based research group said Monday.
In its latest World Economic League Table, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said Asian countries were moving up while European countries were slipping down.
Brazil’s population of about 200 million is more than three times that of Britain.
The Brazilian economy grew 7.5 percent in 2010, but the government has cut its growth projections to 3.5 percent for this year after the economy slowed in the third quarter.
The CEBR also predicted that the British economy would overtake France — ranked fifth this year — by 2016 and it said India, the world’s 10th biggest economy in 2011, would move up to fifth place by 2020.
It says the US economy is the biggest, followed by China, Japan and Germany.
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