Steven Rosenfeld, - Alternet
Stephan: When you live in a society in which profit is the only thing that matters and is, in fact, more important than human wellbeing this is what you end up with. Increasingly, I have come to think that the central problem America faces is that as a culture we have no moral value other than: Is it profitable? Everything else can be sacrificed. And this story centers in California, a state that has more commonsense than most.
Credit: Ismael F. Armendariz Jr.
A blockbuster report detailing how California’s charter school industry has wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars by opening and building schools in communities that don’t need them and often end up doing worse than nearby public schools, is a nationwide warning about how education privateers hijack public funds and harm K-12 public schools.
“This report finds that this funding [building, buying, leasing] is almost completely disconnected from educational policy objectives, and the results are, in turn, scattershot and haphazard,” the report’s executive summary begins. “Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent each year without any meaningful strategy. Far too much of this public funding is spent on schools built in neighborhoods that have no need for additional classroom space, and which offer no improvement over the quality of education already available in nearby public schools. In the worst cases, public facilities funding has gone to schools that were found to have discriminatory enrollment policies and others that have engaged in unethical or corrupt practices.”
The report, “Spending Blind: The […]
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Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Nick Hopkins, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is becoming increasingly evident I think that the Trump campaign and the Russian intelligence services were in league to defeat Hillary Clinton. If the Republicans had even a shred of integrity as a party they would be mounting a major independent special prosecutor investigation which would result in a new election. I don't think they have that shred so consequently I expect this to come to nothing of real substance. The American election was rigged by Russian interference, Trump organization complicity and James Comey's letter in October just before the election. I think historians will mark this as the end of the American imperium.
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.
The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.
Another source suggested the Dutch and the French spy agency, the General Directorate for External Security or DGSE, were contributors.
It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or […]
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Zenobia Jeffries, - Commondreams/Yes! Magazine
Stephan: The privatization of civil water supplies is a trend well underway wherever Republicans are in power. As the report says, "A recent
study predicts that in the next five years, more than one-third of Americans will not be able to afford their water." When profit is a nation's only social value this is what you get.
Each day, Catherine Caldwell hauls three gallons of bottled water to her bathroom and two to her kitchen. She and her family use the water for flushing the toilet, washing hands, and— after heating it on the stove—cleaning dishes and cooking. For bathing, they head to her mother-in-law’s house a few blocks away.
The 44-year-old Caldwell, her husband, and two young grandchildren have been living without running water in their Detroit home for over four months. Every two weeks, they receive a delivery of water from a local nonprofit, We the People of Detroit. It’s the second time they’ve been without water services in the three years they’ve lived at the current residence. The short of it is this: They can’t afford to pay the bill, and the water company shut off their water.
Stories like Caldwell’s are common in Detroit. The city has a 40 percent poverty rate, and residents have seen water bills double over the past 10 years. But more often now, it’s not just Detroit; stories […]
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, - Phys.org/University of Western Australia
Stephan: There is so much we do not know about the matrix of consciousness, and the secret life of plants. Here is the latest revelation.
More information: Monica Gagliano et al. Tuned in: plant roots use sound to locate water,
Oecologia (2017).
DOI: 10.1007/s00442-017-3862-z
Journal reference: Oecologia
Credit: University of Western Australia
A study led by The University of Western Australia has found plants have far more complex and developed senses than we thought with the ability to detect and respond to sounds to find water, and ultimately survive.
In the study “Tuned in:
plant roots use
sound to locate water” published in Oecologia, UWA researchers found that plants can sense
sound vibrations from running water moving through pipes or in the soil, to help their roots move towards the source of water. The study also revealed that plants do not like certain noises and will move away from particular sounds.
Lead researcher Dr Monica Gagliano from UWA’s Centre of Evolutionary Biology at the School of Animal Biology said water was a basic need for a plant’s survival, and the study showed that sound plays a significant role in helping plants cater to this need.
“We used the common garden pea plant (Pisum sativum) as the model for our study and put the […]
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Thursday, April 13th, 2017
Amy Goldstein, Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: Consider this: 64% of Americans, particularly those people who live in the Red value states in the middle of the country and in the south, have never travelled outside the U.S. borders, and many rarely even leave their own area. Perhaps that explains why our shoddy illness profit system survives. Over half the country have nothing with which to compare it.
But a confluence of trends are coming together to make the failure of our profit model healthcare even more obvious. Throughout the country little rural for-profit hospitals are closing. Why? They're not profitable enough. Also the immigrant doctors and nurses who constitute such a large percentage of the staff at those hospitals are no longer coming to the U.S..
If you are an elderly person, or someone with the chronic health problem, the closure of these rural hospitals may mean the difference between you living or dying if an emergency comes up. Here's the story.
Haywood Park Community Hospital in Brownsville, Tenn., closed three years ago, and the sign over its main entrance is covered in black paint. Plywood remains nailed up inside its sliding glass doors.
Credit: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
This town of the Tennessee Delta, seat of a county that once grew the most cotton east of the Mississippi, relied for decades on a little public hospital built during the Great Depression a few blocks from the courthouse square.
The red-brick building was knocked down in the 1970s when a for-profit chain came along and opened a modern stucco hospital on the north side of town. There, thousands of babies were born, pneumonias and failing hearts were treated and the longtime family doctor across the parking lot could wheel the sickest patients who arrived at his office right into the emergency room.
But these days, plywood boards are nailed up behind the hospital’s sliding glass entrances. Black paint is smudged across signs over its doorways. The nearest ER is more […]
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