How valuable are bees? In the UK, about £1.8bn a year, according to new research on the cost of hand-pollinating the many crops bees service for free. If that sounds a far-fetched scenario, consider two facts.

First, bees are in severe decline. Half the UK’s honey bees kept in managed hives have gone, wild honey bees are close to extinction and solitary bees are declining in more than half the place they have been studied.

Second, hand-pollination is already necessary in some places, such as pear orchards in China, and bees are routinely trucked around the US to compensate for the loss of their wild cousins.

The new figure comes from scientists at the Reading University and was released by Friends of the Earth to launch their new campaign, Bee Cause. Paul de Zylva, FoE nature campaigner, said: ‘Unless we halt the decline in British bees our farmers will have to rely on hand-pollination, sending food prices rocketing.

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If there is a group of people more anxious about how the Supreme Court will rule on the health care reform law than President Obama and the millions of Americans who are already benefiting from it, it is health insurance executives.

Not only have their companies been spending millions of dollars implementing the parts of the law that pertains to them – and most of them do – but they also have been counting on the law as very possibly the only thing that can preserve the free market system of health insurance in this country. This is why it is so ironic that defenders of the free market are the most vocal critics of the law and the ones hoping most ardently that the Court will declare it unconstitutional.

Health insurers have known for years that their business practices of excluding growing numbers of Americans from coverage and shifting more and more of the cost of care to policyholders are not sustainable over the long haul. That’s why their top priority during the health care reform debate was to make sure whatever bill Congress passed included the much-vilified individual mandate. And it’s also why the big insurance companies have been working […]

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People who smoke menthol cigarettes were more likely to have a history of stroke than smokers who prefer regular cigarettes, an analysis of federal health survey data indicated.

Among 5,167 current smokers participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 2001 to 2008, those who reported that they usually smoke menthol cigarettes were more than twice as likely to have had a stroke as those smoking nonmenthol cigarettes, according to Nicholas Vozoris, MD, MHSc, of St. Michael’s Hospital and Queen’s University in Toronto.

Vozoris calculated an odds ratio of 2.25 for a history of stroke among the menthol versus nonmenthol cigarette smokers (95% CI 1.33 to 3.78), according to his research letter published in the April 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

‘These results highlight the need for further review of the last legally allowed tobacco additive in North America, given that mentholated cigarettes may be placing individuals at even greater risk of potentially devastating cerebrovascular disease than regular cigarettes,’ Vozoris wrote.

Much of the difference was seen among women and whites, he found.

The odds ratio for stroke history among female menthol cigarette smokers was 3.28 (95% CI 1.74 to 6.19) and among non-African-Americans — who were predominantly white — […]

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The number of new teenage mothers in the United States is at its lowest level in nearly 70 years but remains the highest of any major developed country, according to official figures released Tuesday.

The current rate of 34.3 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 is down 44 percent from a peak in 1991, and is 64 percent lower than the record set during the 1957 ‘baby boom

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To be the swing voter, you have to be willing to swing. In the last three weeks, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has shown how it’s done.

First he wrote the majority opinion in a landmark 5-4 case establishing a constitutional right to an adequate lawyer in plea-bargaining negotiations. Liberals were enthused. Yet in his tough questioning during the Obamacare arguments, he shook up the conventional wisdom that mandatory coverage would be upheld comfortably. Liberals were not enthused. Then, as a coda, he wrote the majority opinion in a 5-4 case allowing jails to strip-search anyone being put into the general prison population — even without suspicion, and even after the most trivial misdemeanor arrest. The same liberals who loved him in March are prepared to loathe him in April.
About Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard and the author of five books, most recently ‘Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDRs Great Supreme Court Justices.’
More about Noah Feldman

What principle, if any, explains Kennedy’s vote in the strip-search case? Kennedy-watchers know that he is deeply sympathetic to arguments based on human dignity. His perception of dignity led him to vote to preserve […]

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