Death rates among less educated, working-class whites have caused life expectancy in the U.S. as a whole to fall.
Illustration by Eiko Ojala/The New Yorker
It all started with a bad back. For more than a decade, the Princeton economist Anne Case had suffered from chronic lower-back pain, and nothing seemed to help. She’d made her name studying the connections between health and economic patterns in people’s lives; her research showed, for instance, a connection between your health in early childhood, or even in utero, and your economic status later in life. So she decided to research the patterns of pain in the population. And as she pulled on this thread she found a bigger, more alarming story than she ever expected.
The question she began with, in 2014, was whether pain had grown more or less prevalent in the United States over the past few decades. Given advances in labor-saving technologies and in pain treatments, she expected that […]
Jack Ma, Asia richest individual
The richest man in Asia, Jack Ma, is planning to ship 500,000 testing kits and 1 million masks to the U.S. in an effort to combat the growing coronavirus pandemic, POLITICO reports.
Testing delays have been a constant problem across the U.S. as the outbreak spreads, sparking concerns that the number of Americans infected is being grossly underreported.
“Drawing from my own country’s experience, speedy and accurate testing and adequate personal protective equipment for medical professionals are most effective in preventing the spread of the virus,” read a statement from Ma’s charitable organization. “We hope that our donation can help Americans fight against the pandemic!”
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue testifies during a House hearing on March 4, 2020. Perdue said Tuesday that the USDA would still enact the rule change even as some called for its delay during the pandemic.
Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty
Just a couple weeks before a Trump administration rule change was set to force 700,000 people to go off food stamps, a federal judge blocked the measure, citing concerns about how the coronavirus pandemic would affect the most vulnerable people in society.
The rule change, which was meant to go into effect on April 1, would have blocked states from being able to waive work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program unless an area has a 6 percent or higher unemployment rate. Under the work requirements, able-bodied adults without children must work at least 20 hours a week for more than three months in a 36-month period. Nineteen states, along with the District of Columbia and New York City, sued to stop the rule change […]
Idaho public lands
Credit: The Idaho Statesman
A federal judge in Idaho has tossed out oil and gas leases on nearly a million acres of public land, lashing the Trump administration’s “arbitrary and capricious” policy of cutting off public input on environmental protections.
The federal Bureau of Land Management “jettisoned prior processes, practices, and norms in favor of changes that emphasized economic maximization — to the detriment, if not outright exclusion of … opportunities for the public to contribute to the decision-making process affecting the management of public lands,” wrote U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush in his decision Thursday.
The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watershed Project on behalf of the greater sage grouse, which supports hundreds of other species across the West.
The ruling affects some $125 million worth of leases issued by the BLM in 2018 on more than 1,300 square miles of federal lands in Nevada, Utah and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
