Saturday, April 8th, 2017
Yvette Cabrera, Investigative Reporter - Think Progress
Stephan: The Tomahawk missiles that were used in the charade that happened last night in Syria cost $500,000 each. Fifty nine of them were launched, so we spent $30 million just for the missiles and probably another $10 million to get ships in place, and to fire them off, and to monitor where they struck. Few seem to have given this expenditure a thought, but I did. And I thought it was a revealing synchronicity that Trump's EPA at the same time didn't think it could afford $16 million annually to protect children from lead. Here's the story. Our values as a country are very screwed up.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to slash funding for programs that protect children from dangerous lead exposure. The move would eliminate programs that raise public awareness about the toxic metal’s risks and train workers on how to safely remove lead-based paint.
The EPA’s proposed cuts were revealed in a budget memo published by the Washington Post. That memo outlines funding cuts for two lead-based paint programs totaling more than $16 million and the elimination of six dozen full-time employees.
Lead-based paint, including lead-contaminated dust, is one of the most common causes of lead poisoning, according to the EPA. A 2011 national housing survey estimated that more than a third of housing units across the nation (37 million of 106 million units) contain lead-based paint, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Research has shown that the neurotoxic effects of lead on a child’s developing brain can be devastating and irreversible. An estimated 2.6 percent of preschool children in the U.S. have a blood lead concentration greater than 5 micrograms per deciliter, the level at which the federal government […]
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Saturday, April 8th, 2017
Bryce Covert, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Less than 100 days in office and the Trump administration through the Department of Labor has already acted to strip away protections for elderly investors making them vulnerable to financial advisors. My mother lost all her money to one of these people, so this act by Trump is particularly offensive to me.
Credit: mdc.edu
As things currently stand, a financial adviser helping a retiree pick investments doesn’t have to put the retiree’s interests first. Instead, the adviser can steer his client toward products that make him money but that might not be the smartest investment choice. This conflicted advice has been estimated to cost Americans $17 billion a year.
The Obama administration took action to change the rules so that advisers have to put retirees’ interests ahead of their own, otherwise known as the fiduciary duty rule. The new rules were set to go into effect this month. But now, the Trump administration is taking steps to whittle them down or do away with them altogether, allowing advisers to continue pushing clients into costly investment choices.
On Tuesday evening, the administration officially delayed the implementation of the new rules by 60 days, pushing one part of it back to June and the rest of it to January 2018.
In February, […]
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Saturday, April 8th, 2017
Mary Emily O'Hara, - NBC News
Stephan: The EPA is not the only agency whose regulations are being gutted. This report describes the removal of rules in the workplace that protect women. Republicans have a lot of problems with women; it is one of the things that defines the party.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, left, and Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, signs a series of bills during a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 27. One of the bills that Trump signed was H.J. Res. 37, which nullifies the rule issued by the Department of Defense, the General Services Administration and NASA implementing the Obama-era executive order on “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces.”
Credit: Stephen Crowley / New York Times via Redux Pictures
With little notice, President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that advocates say rolls back hard-fought victories for women in the workplace.
Tuesday’s “Equal Pay Day” — which highlights the wage disparity between men and women — is the perfect time to draw more attention to the president’s action, activists say.
On March 27, Trump revoked the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order then-President Barack Obama put in place to ensure that companies with federal contracts comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws. The Fair Pay order was […]
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Joe Romm, Founding Editor of Climate Progress - Think Progress
Stephan: Here is some more good news about the transition out of the carbon energy era. Although the Trump administration is committed to protect carbon energy, the world as a whole is moving in a very different direction. As this report describes, "Unsubsidized renewables have become the cheapest source of new power — by far."
Last year, solar in Chile set a record low global price for unsubsidized electricity by any technology.
Credit: ACERA.
Stunning drops in the cost of wind and solar energy have turned the global power market upside down.
For years, opponents of renewable power, like President Donald Trump, have argued they simply aren’t affordable. The reality is quite different.
Unsubsidized renewables have become the cheapest source of new power — by far — in more and more countries, according to a new report from the United Nations and Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
In just one year, the cost of solar generation worldwide dropped on average 17 percent, the report found. The average costs for […]
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Michael Lipka and Conrad Hackett, Senior Editor and Religion Demographer - Pew Research Center
Stephan: If you read SR regularly you know that it is my view that we have a series of meta-trends that are powerfully shaping the future, but that are almost never discussed as such. To restate: 1) Being born White will no longer confer privilege; 2) being born male will no longer automatically bestow dominance; 3) West cultural values will no longer dominate how the world operations; and, 4) the transfer of real power from nation states to virtual corporate states. 1) and 2) are major factors in Trump's election. This report provides data on 3).
All of these trends are generating fear fugues in a portion of the population who find these changes unacceptable yet unstoppable.
In the next half century or so, Christianity’s long reign as the world’s largest religion may come to an end, according to a just-released report that builds on Pew Research Center’s original population growth projections for religious groups. Indeed, Muslims will grow more than twice as fast as the overall world population between 2015 and 2060 and, in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group.
While the world’s population is projected to grow 32% in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70% – from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060. In 2015, Muslims made up 24.1% of the global population. Forty-five years later, they are expected to make up more than three-in-ten of the world’s people (31.1%).
The main reasons for Islam’s growth ultimately involve simple demographics. To begin with, Muslims have more children than members of the seven other major religious groups analyzed in the study. Muslim women have an average of 2.9 children, significantly above the next-highest group […]
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