In a Brooklyn winery on a sultry July evening, an elegant crowd sips rosé and nibbles trout plucked from the gin-clear streams of upstate New York. The diners are here, with their checkbooks, to support a group called Chefs for the Marcellus, which works to protect the foodshed upon which hundreds of regional farm-to-fork restaurants depend. The foodshed is coincident with the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation that arcs northeast from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York State. As everyone invited here knows, the region is both agriculturally and energy rich, with vast quantities of natural gas sequestered deep below its fertile fields and forests.

In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear-drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or ‘fracking

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A US judge has ordered tobacco firms to pay for a public campaign laying out ‘past deception’ over smoking risks.

The ruling sets out the wording of a series of ‘corrective statements’ that the companies are being told to make over a period of up to two years.

Details of which media will carry the statements and how much they will cost are yet to be determined.

Tobacco companies can appeal against the decision. Several said they were studying the ruling.

District Judge Gladys Kessler used proposals from the US justice department as the basis for the statements.

Each is to be prefaced by wording that the tobacco firms had ‘deliberately deceived the American public about the health effects of smoking’.

One statement reads: ‘Smoking kills, on average, 1,200 Americans. Every day.’

Another says: ‘Defendant tobacco companies intentionally designed cigarettes to make them more addictive.’
‘Vitally important’

Judge Kessler first ordered the advertising campaign in 2006, saying tobacco firms hid the risks of smoking for decades.

A long debate on the wording of the statements has followed.

Tobacco companies have fought for the word ‘deceived’ not to be used, and have complained that the statements would represent ‘forced public confessions’.

The justice department is due to meet tobacco companies next month […]

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ST. LOUIS — After months of drought, companies that ship grain and other goods down the Mississippi River are being haunted by a potential nightmare: If water levels fall too low, the nation’s main inland waterway could become impassable to barges just as the harvest heads to market.

Any closure of the river would upend the transport system that has carried American grain since before steamboats and Mark Twain. So shipping companies are scrambling to find alternative ways to move tons of corn, wheat and other crops to the Gulf Coast for shipment overseas.

‘You can’t just wait until it shuts down and suddenly say, ‘There’s a problem,” said Rick Calhoun, head of marine operations for Chicago-based Cargill Inc. ‘We’re always looking at Plan B.’

The mighty Mississippi is approaching the point where it may become too shallow for barges that carry food, fuel and other commodities. If the river is closed for a lengthy period, experts say, economic losses could climb into the billions of dollars.

It isn’t just the shipping and grain industries that will feel the pinch. Grocery prices and utility bills could rise. And deliveries of everything from road-clearing rock salt for winter and fertilizer for the spring planting season […]

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The polar ice sheets are indeed shrinking-and fast, according to a comprehensive new study on climate change.

And the effects, according to an international team, are equally clear-sea levels are rising faster than predicted, which could bring about disastrous effects for people and wildlife.

Rising seas would increase the risk of catastrophic flooding like that caused by Hurricane Sandy last month in New York and New Jersey. Environmental damage may include widespread erosion, contamination of aquifers and crops, and harm to marine life. And in the long term, rising seas may force hundreds of millions of people who live along the coast to abandon their homes.

By reconciling nearly two decades of often conflicting satellite data into one format-in other words, comparing apples to apples-the new study, published in the journal Science, made a more confident estimate of what’s called ice sheet mass balance.

That refers to how much snow is deposited on an ice sheet versus how much is lost, either due to surface melting or ice breaking off glaciers.

Between 1992-when polar satellite measurements began-and 2011, the results show that all of the polar regions except for East Antarctica are losing ice, said study leader Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at […]

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CFO Magazine would seem an unlikely source of cheerleading for more inclusion of complementary and integrative medicine practices and providers into U.S. health care delivery. Yet the magazine that targets chief financial officers (CFOs) of Fortune 500 firms has been shaking those pom poms in recent months.

There is a smart economic alignment that connects these stakeholders at the economic hip. They may even be a perfect marriage, as one writer recently put it.

An October CFO Playbook on Health Care Cost Management webinar featured the medical doctor who chairs the most significant lobbying group for integrative health care, the Integrative Healthcare Policy Consortium. The presentation from Leonard Wisneski, M.D., was assertively titled ‘Integrative Medicine: The Future of Health Care Delivery.’ Wisneski, a former medical officer for a large employer, urged extensive piloting of integrative approaches for their cost-saving possibilities.

Later that month, CFO featured an expansive alternative medicine benefit program offered by the $13 billion global manufacturer Parker Hannifin. The article led with a similarly assertive title — though this time as a question: ‘A Solution to Our Country’s Big Health Care Problem?’ Parker Hannifin’s CEO Don Washkewicz is confident the answer is yes: ‘[The program is in its] early days, but […]

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