Saturday, February 13th, 2016
Andrew Buncombe, Reporter - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: The U.S. has a dreadful infant mortality rate -- 27th in the world. A child born in rural North Carolina has less chance to see their first birthday than a child born in Botswana, Africa. How to address that effectively? Here's the answer.
The Finnish baby box idea has been adopted by more than 30 countries
Credit: AP
For more than three-quarters of a century, officials in Finland have been handing new parents everything they need for their baby.
The “baby box” – complete with clothes, toys, nappies and even a built-in mattress to enable the box to be used as a bed – has helped the country secure one of the lowest infant mortality rates of any country.
Now, the idea has been adopted by Canada, which has among one of the worst records for infant deaths in the industrialised world.
One report says Canada has the second worst infant mortality rate in the industrialised world
Officials in the state of Alberta have rolled out a pilot scheme of the programme, providing 1,500 baby boxes.
Macleans magazine reported that Jennifer Clary, co-founder of the California-based The Baby Box Co, which is the first company […]
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Friday, February 12th, 2016
Steve Connor, Science Editor - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: This is one of the most extraordinary confirmations of theory in the history of science. It has taken 100 years to confirm Einstein's prediction of Gravity Waves, but it has happened. There were hundreds of stories on this, not surprisingly. I chose this report because it clearly describes the research, and it also addresses the implications.
Source:
Nature
A simulation of the cloud of gas getting swallowed by the black hole
Credit: The Independent
Gravitational ripples in the fabric of spacetime, first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, have now been detected by scientists who believe the discovery opens new vistas into the “dark” side of the Universe.
Physicists around the world confirmed that they had detected unambiguous signals of gravitational waves emanating from the collision of two massive black holes 1.5 billion light years away in deep space.
As the two black holes spiralled into one another in a violent collision that was over in a second, immense amounts of matter were instantly converted into energy, which sent shock waves travelling through space for 1.5 billion years until they were picked up by gravitational-wave instruments on Earth.
The detection of gravitational waves not only confirms Einstein’s […]
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Friday, February 12th, 2016
Alexander Kent, - 24/7 Wall St
Stephan: I have had four SR readers write me this week about their fall from a secure middle class life to a much more constrained and problematic lifestyle. And the fear and anger this has produced.
Income Inequality is the bass note of the 2016 election. To understand what is really going on one has to get down in the weeds with actual data. This essay helps with that. What particularly strikes me is that this decline is occurring in both Red value and Blue value states. Why is that important? I think because this tells us there is a deeper more fundamental trend that over arches both: Profit, as opposed to wellness, is the first social priority.
Despite the country’s unemployment rate falling below 5% in January for the first time since 2008, and the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006, concerns about wage growth — particularly among middle earners — remain. Since 2010, as the country began to recover from the Great Recession, income of the top 20% of households grew 3.7% from 2010 through 2014. During that time, incomes of the middle 20% of households declined 0.7%.
Based on income earned before taxes by the third quintile — the middle 20% of earners in each state — middle class incomes in Rhode Island declined the most in the country. Incomes among middle class Rhode Island households fell by 3.1% from 2010 to 2014, while income among the state’s fifth quintile, the top 20% of state households, grew by 4.5%. Based on an analysis of household incomes among America’s middle class, these are the states where the middle class is suffering the most.
Consumption is by far the largest component of GDP. Because middle income families typically spend large shares of their income on goods and services, America’s middle class is expected to drive up consumption — and by extension, GDP. […]
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Friday, February 12th, 2016
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This guidance from the Vatican is so bizarre one has to ask what is actually going on? Here's my take: The proportion of the Roman Catholic clergy that is homosexual or bisexual, but in any case not celibate, is so large, and there are so many people who would be involved and embarrassed that this community can bend policy to their aims, even in the face of ridicule and derision.
Credit: www.cruxnow.com
ROME — The Catholic church is telling newly appointed bishops that it is “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of clerical child abuse and that only victims or their families should make the decision to report abuse to police.
A document that spells out how senior clergy members ought to deal with allegations of abuse, which was recently released by the Vatican, emphasised that, though they must be aware of local laws, bishops’ only duty was to address such allegations internally.
“According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds,” the training document states.
The training guidelines were written by a controversial […]
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Friday, February 12th, 2016
Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and Senior Policy Advisor for Freedom Leaf - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: If you are into watching social transformations the end of marijuana prohibition is one of the most fascinating trends I have ever watched. Alcohol and marijuana prohibition are often compared and they certainly have many common aspects. But they also have significant differences. One of the most important is that unlike the end of alcohol prohibition, which mostly left society with a series of social cancers like the mafia, marijuana prohibition is ending by making all kinds of positive contributions to society. Here is a report on some of them.
I am particularly struck by the fact that the overwhelming majority of medical marijuana users are older adults.
A jar of medical marijuana is displayed at the California Heritage Market in Los Angeles. David McNew / REUTERS
Contentions that scientists have failed to conduct sufficient research on the health effects of cannabis are unfounded. A keyword search on the National Library of Medicine database reveals nearly 23,000 peer-reviewed papers specific to the marijuana plant, and new scientific discoveries are published almost daily rebuking the federal government’s assertion that the herb is a highly dangerous substance lacking therapeutic efficacy.
Here are five new cannabis-centric studies that warrant mainstream attention.
1. Pot Use Linked To Better Outcomes In Brain Injury Patients
The use of cannabis is associated with improved outcomes in patients hospitalized with intracerebral hemorrhaging (ICH aka bleeding in the brain). An international team of investigators from Argentina, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States evaluated demographic trends and patient outcomes in a cohort of 725 subjects with spontaneous ICH. Researchers reported that cannabis-positive subjects possessed “milder ICH presentation” […]
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