Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
TARA BAHRAMPOUR, - The Washington Post
Stephan: A major trend, the inflow of Hispanics, has shifted. This report gives a good first assessment of what is likely to happen in the short term.
A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.
It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.
‘I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,
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Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
JULIA WHITTY, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Here is some very good news. I had not realized this, and perhaps you hadn't either. But this is something on the plus side.
Click through to see some very interesting charts.
In case it sometimes feels like we’ve never done anything good for the wild parts of our planet, take a look at these stats from the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).
My piece, ‘Can One Incredibly Stubborn Person Save a Species?’ is about one conservation success story: Mexican biologist Enreiqueta Velarde, who has singlehandedly brought two bird species back from the brink of extinction on an Island off the coast of Mexico. Happily, Velarde’s story is part of a larger trend. Since 1872 we’ve taken a once radical idea-preserving nature-and scaled it up globally with amazing speed.
According to the WDPA:
As of 2008 there are >120,000 protected areas covering a total of about 8 million square miles (~21 million square kilometers) of land and sea
That’s an area more than twice the size of Canada
Terrestrial protected areas cover 12.2 percent of the Earth’s land area
Marine protected areas cover 5.9% of Earth’s territorial seas and 0.5% of extraterritorial seas
There’s still much variation from nation to nation:
Only 45 percent of 236 assessed countries and territories have >10 percent of […]
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Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
GLORIA GOODALE, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: The Rightist media machine which, as an organization one can only respect for its effectiveness, by repeating a lie endlessly have canonized it in common wisdom: The media favors the left. Now, in a bracing rush of actual data, it is clear it does not. Quite the contrary.
A media report card from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released Monday included a few surprises, as well as a message about the pervasiveness of the media and their power in shaping the public’s perception of the political process.
The Project analyzed the tone and volume of candidate coverage from Jan. 2 through April 15 focusing on 52 key news outlets, but also using computers to track coverage in more than 11,000 news outlets. The team also looked at campaign stories from November through April 15.
That window, however, turned out to be too short. ‘One of the most remarkable and perhaps depressing things about modern political coverage is how early it starts,
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MARIO BEAUREGARD, - Salon
Stephan: The title of this piece is overblown, it does not explain Near Death fully. For that I strongly recommend you get a copy of Pim van Lommel's Consciousness After Life. It is the most up to date and comprehensive book written on the the subject of Near Death Experiences and beyond.
However, this essay will give you a give sense of the state of the art concerning this area of research.
In 1991, Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds felt extremely dizzy, lost her ability to speak, and had difficulty moving her body. A CAT scan showed that she had a giant artery aneurysm-a grossly swollen blood vessel in the wall of her basilar artery, close to the brain stem. If it burst, which could happen at any moment, it would kill her. But the standard surgery to drain and repair it might kill her too.
With no other options, Pam turned to a last, desperate measure offered by neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Spetzler was a specialist and pioneer in hypothermic cardiac arrest-a daring surgical procedure nicknamed ‘Operation Standstill.
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STEVEN ROSENFELD, - AlterNet
Stephan: By any objective measurement Obama has been a disaster for civil liberties. The only thing I can say in his defense is that he is still better than Romney, and the lunacy of the Theocratic Right.
When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.
It started with the 9/11 attacks. Within a week, Congress, including many liberals, gave the White House blanket authority to wage a war on the terrorists. A month after that, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, authorizing many anti-terrorism measure including expanded surveillance. By mid-November, the White House ordered creation of military tribunals to try terrorists who were not U.S. citizens.
Bush quickly expanded covert operations, creating a shadow arrest, interrogation and detention system based at Guantanamo that violated international law and evaded domestic oversight. While the Supreme Court eventually ruled that detainees have some rights, the precedent that the Constitution does not restrict how a president conducts an endless war against a stateless enemy was firmly planted. In response, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union proposed reforms the […]
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