Workers leave burning plant spewing toxic fumes.
Credit:AFP
More than 5,000 workers were killed on the job in 2016 and nearly 3.7 million injuries on the job were reported (millions more went unreported), the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report reveals. The death toll of 5,190 means 14 people killed per day just doing their jobs. Some key statistics:
Workplace violence deaths increased significantly in 2016:
- Workplace violence is now the second-leading cause of workplace death.
- 866 worker deaths were caused by violence, an increase from 703.
- 500 worker deaths were workplace homicides.
- Violence was responsible for more than 27,000 lost-time injuries.
- Women workers are at greater risk of violence than men; they suffered two-thirds of the lost-time injuries related to workplace violence.
- There is no federal OSHA standard to protect workers from workplace violence; the Trump administration has sidelined an OSHA workplace violence standard.
Latino and immigrant workers’ safety and health has improved, but the risk to these workers still is greater than other workers:
- The Latino fatality rate was 3.7 per 100,000 workers, down from […]
Leave a CommentStephan: The NRA are not complete fools, just complete hypocrites. Goaded by the Secret Service no guns or knives will be permitted in the auditorium when Mike Pence speaks to the NRA. The irony goes completely by them.
Vice President Mike Pence
Vice President Mike Pence will be a keynote speaker at the National Rifle Association’s convention in Dallas this week, and unlike the rest of the convention’s events, guns will not be allowed.
The vice president will speak at the NRA Institute for Legislative Action leadership forum at the convention May 4 as part of a “powerful lineup of pro-freedom speakers,” the association announced last week.
The NRA website’s event page for the forum says “firearms and firearm accessories, knives or weapons of any kind” are banned from the forum before and during Pence’s attendance. Because the vice president will be there, the U.S. Secret Service is in charge of event security, the NRA website says.
Cameron Kasky, a survivor of the Parkland shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, shared a screenshot of the weapons ban on Twitter, calling the NRA a “hilarious parody of itself.”
Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg, who was killed in the Parkland shooting, chimed in: “I thought giving everyone a gun was to enhance safety. Am I […]
Stephan: This report describes an extraordinary social transformation project. I cannot think of anything remotely like it in modern history.
The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant – and it elicited a big response.“This one is more beautiful!” Asset Kaipiyev exclaims in surprise. The co-founder of a small restaurant in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, Kaipiyev had just been shown the latest version of the new alphabet, approved by President Nursultan Nazarbayev earlier in the day.
The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan’s current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population – a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev’s iron fist for almost three decades.
In this first version of the new alphabet,apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it “ugly”.
The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respýblıkasy, removing the apostrophes.
“It is more beautiful than the former variant,” says Kaipiyev. […]
Stephan: Did you know some spiders live for decades? I certainly did not. I found this story fascinating.
No. 16 a 42 year old trapdoor spider
Credit: AFPThe world’s oldest known spider has died at the ripe old age of 43 after being monitored for years during a long-term population study in Australia, researchers say.
The trapdoor matriarch comfortably outlived the previous record holder, a 28-year-old tarantula found in Mexico, according to a study published on Monday in the Pacific Conservation Biology Journal.
The spider did not die of old age but was killed by a wasp sting, researchers said.
Named Number 16, the spider helped scientists to unlock important information about the behaviour of an arachnid that can be found across Australia, including in domestic gardens.
“To our knowledge this is the oldest spider ever recorded, and her significant life has allowed us to further investigate the trapdoor spider’s behaviour and population dynamics,” said the lead author, Leanda Mason from Curtin University in Perth.
A research project to study trapdoor […]
Stephan: Here is a sample of the current debate going on at the Davos meetings about wealth inequity. What strikes me about this debate is that although some of these ideas would help, there is no coherent overall commitment to fostering social wellbeing.
Davos security guards
Credit: Jeff Stein/Washington PostImagine you had complete control of the U.S. government: What one thing would you do to reduce the country’s staggering economic inequality?
It’s no small task: The 400 richest Americans control more wealth than the poorest 80 million households, and as the richest citizens continue to capture the lion’s share of new wealth — the top 5 percent has captured 74 percent of the wealth created in this country since 1982 — the situation is only growing more extreme.
But while there’s consensus that America is a wildly unequal country, there’s broad disagreement on what, if anything, should be done to address that. That’s certainly true in Congress, where disagreement and deadlock have consigned meaningful action on inequality to the realm of the hypothetical.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask what could happen. And in that spirit, we asked experts from across the ideological spectrum what they would do to address inequality if they were king (or queen) for a day.
Their ideas included a sovereign wealth fund for […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
