MICHAEL WINES, - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is the latest on the bee die-off. Not a happy story, and one more complicated than was previously understood.
Dead Bees
A prolonged and mysterious die-off of the nation’s honeybees, a trend worrisome both to beekeepers and farmers who depend on the insects to pollinate their crops, apparently worsened last year.
In an annual survey released on Wednesday by the Bee Informed Partnership, a consortium of universities and research laboratories, about 5,000 beekeepers reported losing 42.1 percent of their colonies in the 12-month period that ended in April. That is well above the 34.2 percent loss reported for the same period in 2013 and 2014, and it is the second-highest loss recorded since year-round surveys began in 2010. (emphasis added)
Most striking, however, was that honeybee deaths spiked last summer, exceeding winter deaths for the first time. Commercial beekeepers, some of whom rent their hives to farmers during pollination seasons, were hit especially hard, the survey’s authors stated.
“We expect the colonies to die during the winter, because that’s a stressful […]
No Comments
Stephan: This is how criminally rapacious the pharmaceutical component of the Illness Profit System has become. This ought to be a national scandal. But Corporate media, which profits from it — consider how many drug commercials you see on T.V in say a normal news program — doesn't cover it. This unrestrained profit taking from drugs is one of the failures of Obamacare, which did nothing to alter the profit based model of U.S. healthcare.
With the drug industry launching more expensive targeted therapies, the number of Americans with annual medication costs of more than $50,000 has jumped more than 60% to nearly 600,000, a new analysis shows.
The latest drug spending trend report from pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts ESRX +0.17% (ESRX) shows 576,000 Americans with annual medication costs of $50,000 or more. That’s a 63% increase in 2014 from 2013 when 352,000 Americans had such high costs.
While the number of patients with annual spending above $50,000 was just 0.2% of patients, the amount of drugs they and their health plans or employers paid for accounted for 16% of total spending, the analysis showed.
“The profile emerging from this research shows these patients are overwhelmingly taking specialty medications, and have multiple comorbidities, prescriptions and prescribers,” Dr. Glen Stettin, ExpressScripts’ senior vice president of clinical research and new solutions, said in a statement accompanying the analysis.
Express Scripts certainly has a vested interest in issuing […]
No Comments
Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
Joanna Rothkopf, Assistant Editor - Salon
Stephan: This story makes a point that I have observed myself. There are parts of the U.S. where obesity is so common amongst both adults and children that it comes to be seen as "normal." In a sense if everyone is fat culturally no one is fat. Skinny people are the outliers. In that way this is a an account of a cultural tragedy.
Credit: Survivalfarm
A new study from researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center found that 94.9 percent of parents of overweight children aged 2 to 5 believe their kids’ weights are “just right.” (emphasis added)The study is a follow-up of a similar survey taken around 20 years ago — most alarmingly, the researchers found that the chances of parents appropriately gauging the weight and health of their children went down by 30 percent.
“We have changed our perceptions of what our weight ideals are,” said Dustin T. Duncan, an assistant professor at NYU’s Department of Population Health and the study’s lead researcher. Because of that, Duncan argues, we are less capable of seeing your child accurately.
“If every other child is obese or overweight, you would think your child is [normal],” he continued.
The study, which was published in the journal Childhood Obesity, focused on a sample of over 3,000 children from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (one sample taken in 1988-1994 and the other from 2007-2012) — instead of on a sample of exclusively […]
No Comments
Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
Judith Resnik, Cruz Reynoso, Honorable H. Lee Sarokin, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Laurence H. Tribe, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: This letter to Majority Leader McConnell, Minority Leader Reid, Speaker Boehner, and Minority Leader Pelosi supports Senator Elizabeth Warren's opposition to TPP, that won the day, today. This letter, I think, makes the argument on why the trade agreement should not pass, and I agree with it.
Protesters greet President Obama in Portland, Oregon, with signs in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
April 30, 2015
Dear Majority Leader McConnell, Minority Leader Reid, Speaker Boehner, and Minority Leader Pelosi:
We write out of grave concern about a document we have not been able to see. Although it has not been made available publicly, we understand that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement currently being negotiated includes Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions. ISDS allows foreign investors—and only foreign investors—to avoid the courts and instead to argue to a special, private tribunal that they believe certain government actions diminish the value of their investments.
Courts are central institutions in the rule of law. Americans have much to be proud of in the evolution of our court system, which has evolved over the centuries and now provides equal access for all persons. Courts enable the public to observe the processes of development of law […]
No Comments
Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
Stephan: This story explains why we are going to see migrations out of the Southwest as a result of water scarcity. This trend is going to have an enormous negative impact on the economics of the region, and the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Environmentalists have long-lamented the damming of scenic Glen Canyon in the early 1960’s to create the 186-mile-long Lake Powell. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is evaluating four proposals to manage the drought on the Colorado River, which supplies water and power to millions of people in the western states. The bureau has warned that shortages are possible as early as 2010. If the water drops too far, power generators at the dams will become inoperable.
Credit: ozarker.org
Last week, Lake Mead, which sits on the border of Nevada and Arizona, set a new record […]
1 Comment
