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Buying and eating apples seems a pretty healthy thing to do. But a new study has found that every 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) of conventionally grown apples creates health effects costing 21 cents due to the effects of pesticides and fungicides, resulting in sick leave and eventually shorter life expectancies.
The study, from the Dutch organization Soil & More Impacts, to be published at the end of May, highlights a key problem: The price you pay for apples in the store doesn’t cover the hidden costs of producing them. Instead, these are paid for by society — through the ever-increasing costs of health care and health insurance.
The apple example is not an outlier; it’s indicative of the bigger picture. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry, with 1 billion people engaged in farming worldwide. Pasture and cropland use about 50 percent of the earth’s habitable […]
Credit: Artur Widak
Ireland, a once fiercely Catholic country, has voted by a landslide in favor of legalizing abortion in a referendum.
Final results gave a Yes vote of 66 percent, slightly less than forecast in exit polls last night. Yes won by a majority of more than 700,000 out of a total of 2,153,613 votes, winning 1,429,981 of the votes.
In some parts of Dublin, the Yes vote exceeded 75 percent, while only one county, the more rural region of Donegal, voted No, by a margin of 52-48. However the Donegal result appeared to be an anomaly rather than indicative of a rural—urban divide; all three of the remote Arran Islands voted in favor of repeal by 67-33.
Dublin Central was one of the first counts to declare, with 76.5 percent voting for Yes.
Eighty-seven percent of those aged 18-24 voted for repeal.
The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, hailed the result as “the culmination of a quiet revolution that has been taking place in Ireland for the past […]
TIJUANA, MEXICO – APRIL 30:
Mirna Lastenia Aldana Diaz holds her son Joshua Gaciel and prays during a prayer service held for the group of Central American migrants at the San Ysidro border crossing while they wait to walk to the United States border and have their cases processed on April 30, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico. Hundreds of migrants from Central America traveled for about a month across Mexico to reach the United States border. Many of the migrants will seek asylum.
Credit: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post
How does one “lose” almost 1,500 children?
Last month, Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the administration for children and families (ACF), announced at a Senate hearing that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — which is to say, an office he oversees — was “unable to determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,475 children between October and December.”
The Trump administration is seeking to criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the US-Mexico border, including […]
A few weeks ago, I got an email from my 7th grade son’s school. Apparently, a teacher had seen the 13-year-old as he walked around the downtown area near Penn State’s campus and was concerned. Rather than feel supported by a community checking in on him, the whole thing left us with the sense that we were under surveillance.
I’d never given the idea of allowing him to walk in our extremely safe town on his own much thought until the school contacted me, but the email led to some digging after which I discovered that what we experienced was a norm across the country. Turns out, the question of whether or not kids can be out and about on their own has been a significant topic of debate, so much so that Utah recently passed new legislation redefining child neglect. The new law makes Utah the first state in the country to protect “free-range parenting.” Up until the law was passed, a parent could be charged with neglect if their kids were left unattended in public.
I’ve recently written […]
The White House letter with English teacher edits.
A retired high school English teacher says a letter she received from President Trump would have barely earned passing marks, so she corrected the letter and sent it back to the White House.
Yvonne Mason, an Atlanta resident who retired last year after teaching middle and high school students in South Carolina for 17 years, corrected grammatical mistakes in the letter bearing Trump’s signature, including 11 instances of improper capitalization of words like “president” and “state.”
“If it had been written in middle school, I’d give it a C or C-plus,” Mason told South Carolina’s Greenville News. “If it had been written in high school, I’d give it a D.”
She did not attach a letter grade to the letter she sent back to the White House.
Mason acknowledges the letter was likely written by a staffer. She received it after penning a letter requesting that Trump meet individually with the families who lost loved ones in the Feb. 14 high school shooting in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
