LONDON — The 
Credit: Sarah Frostenson
Over the past few days, our inboxes have been flooded with letters from doctors and medical researchers whose lives have been shaken up by President Donald Trump’s executive order, which, among other things, restricts immigrants and visa holders from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
We’ve heard from foreign-born health care workers who are trapped inside the United States, and from those who can’t enter, despite having jobs, research positions, and US visas or green cards. It’s gut-wrenching.
But the chaos unleashed by the executive order also reveals a little-appreciated fact about our health care system: We’re heavily reliant on foreigners. They’re our doctors, nurses, and home care aides, and they often work in the remote places where American-born doctors don’t want to go.
In many ways, the health system is already stretched too thin, with scarcely enough people spread evenly across the country to do many difficult jobs. And a letter from the American Medical Association to the Secretary of Homeland Security today spelled out […]
Rescue teams in York attend the scene of a flood in 2015
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Extreme weather cost Europe more than £300bn and ended the lives of 85,000 people over the last three decades – and the problems are getting worse as the world warms, according to a new report by the European Environment Agency (EEA). (emphasis added)
The document, called Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe, revealed the cost to the economy had soared by about 80 per cent over the last 30 years.
During the 1980s, the damages averaged about €7.6bn (about £6.5bn) a year, but by the 2000s the figure had risen to €13.7bn, the report said. Overall between 1980 and 2013, the cost was nearly €393bn.
Some 75,000 deaths were attributed to heatwaves, with about 4,400 from floods, about 3,300 from storms and a similar number from droughts, forest fires and cold weather.
One perhaps unexpected effect of global warming has been to make parts of Europe unusually cold. The normally consistent jet stream in the region […]
