Stephan: Declining bee populations, declining populations of butterflies and other insects, and now reports on declining bird populations. Human greed and stupidity, is destroying the earth's matrix of life, and instead of consciously working to repair our planet we are obsessed with racism and fascism. Want an example of what I mean? 588,042 Pennsylvanians voted yesterday for Republican Doug Mastriano for governor an openly fascist White supremacist who helped put together the 6 January insurrection.
Citation for the research study upon which this report is based: State of the World’s Birds – Alexander C. Lees et al. – Annual Review of Environment and Resources -May 4, 2022 – DOI: 10.1146/annurev-environ-112420-014642
Staggering declines in bird populations are taking place around the world, mainly due to the loss and degradation of natural habitats and direct overexploitation of many species.
The authors reviewed changes in avian biodiversity using data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” to reveal population changes among the globe’s 11 000 bird species.
Despite their findings, study authors say there is hope for avian conservation efforts, but transformative change is needed.
This study presents an overview of the global spatiotemporal distribution of avian biodiversity, changes in our knowledge of that biodiversity, and the extent to which it is imperiled. It summarizes the threats driving changes in bird species richness and abundance, highlighting the increasingly synergistic interactions between threats such as habitat loss, climate change, and overexploitation.1
Many metrics of avian biodiversity are exhibiting globally consistent negative trends, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List Index showing a steady deterioration in the conservation status of the global avifauna over the past three decades.
“We are now witnessing the first signs of a new wave […]
Stephan: Student loan debt has been a huge issue and cause of stress for millions. And yet millions voted for Republicans yesterday, and five Republicans, including Mitt Romney, supposedly one of the "good" Republicans, just blocked President Biden's bill to cancel or forgive student debt. It is amazing to me that tens of millions of Americans repeatedly vote for Republicans even when it means the very people for whom they vote will act to diminish the quality of their lives. The irrefutable truth no one will talk about is that the problems in America are due to Americans themselves.
Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks to reporters outside of the Senate Chambers during a series of votes in the U.S. Capitol Building on May 11, 2022 in Washington, DC. Credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty
Five Republican senators on Wednesday introduced a bill that would prohibit student loan forgiveness.
The legislation bars Biden from taking any action to cancel or forgive borrowers’ balances.
The bill is unlikely to become law anytime soon with a 50-50 Senate and Democratic-controlled House.
Student loan borrowers eager for broad debt forgiveness will be out of luck if Sen. Mitt Romney has anything to say about it.
The lawmaker from Utah along with several of his Republican colleagues on Wednesday introduced a new bill that would bar the Biden administration from broadly canceling student loan debt — a political move the president has been considering since he took office last year.
The Student Loan Accountability Act would prohibit Biden’s Education, Justice, and Treasury Departments from taking any action that would cancel or forgive student loan borrowers’ outstanding balances or even portions of those balances, according to a Wednesday press release.
Stephan: This story gives us a sense of what is coming because a large bloc of Americans are not willing to accept that women are the equal of men, and those who feel this way will vote for politicians who create policies to reflect their views. Unless something fundamentally changes before November, I am really afraid we are going to see the end of America as we have known it.
Reproductive Health Services is one of the few remaining clinics that perform abortions in Alabama. Credit: Hannah Cauhepe/Hans Lucas / Reuters
If you want to understand the future of medical care for pregnant women in a post-Roe world, look no further than what is happening in Alabama. As others have pointed out for Slate, the leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization paves the way for criminalizing many aspects of pregnancy. While Texas’ abortion ban, S.B. 8, has essentially halted all abortions in the state, Alabama offers a glimpse of a troubling future in which the provision of medical care for pregnant people is deeply intertwined with the cultural attitudes that seek to criminalize “undesirable” pregnancy outcomes.
In the summer of 2020, I got a firsthand experience of these attitudes in action. Three weeks after starting to practice at West Alabama Women’s Center, my application for a medical license was denied and my temporary medical license revoked for what we can’t help but question may have been political reasons. Although I had been hired to offer general gynecological care, the […]
Stephan: How is it possible that the richest nation on earth has the worst Covid death rate of all the nations of the world? Why? Poor healthcare structure for sure. But that is only a piece of it. The big reason is that the MAGAt Republicans, led by Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch, and their minions politicized and actively misled millions of men and women with anti-vaxxer nonsense. They created the American death cult that has caused these horrible numbers.
American flags fly at half-staff to mark one million deaths from the coronavirus on the National Mall in Washington, on 12 May. Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Virus has laid bare America’s fragmented healthcare system and corrosive racial and socioeconomic inequality
More than one million people have died in the Covid-19 pandemic in the US, far and away the most deaths of any country.
While the sheer number of deaths from the coronavirus sets the US apart, the country’s large population of 332.5 million people does not explain the staggering mortality rate, which is among the highest in the world.
For every 100,000 residents, 303 people have died from Covid-19, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. Among the 20 worst affected nations, only one other countries – Brazil – has higher mortality rates per 100,000 people.
Deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 are only one measure of the pandemic’s toll. Deaths from drug overdoses hit a record high in 2021, killing at least 100,000 Americans. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and dementia have contributed to the number of “excess […]
Stephan: This is an appalling report on the hundreds of thousands of anti-vaxxer individuals who chose to join the American death cult and give up their lives to willful ignorance. And in addition to these 319,000 now dead individuals I think we can assume that are probably at least another four people close to them, spouses, children, parents, close friends, and cousins whose lives were hurt by those deaths. The MAGAts who pushed this anti-vaxxer nonsense are, in essence, indirect murderers.
A member of the Philadelphia Fire Department prepares a dose of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Credit: Matt Rourke/AP
About a third of the 1 million lives lost to COVID-19 could have been saved with vaccines, a new analysis shows.
Researchers at the Brown School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Microsoft AI for Health analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and The New York Times and came up with not only 319,000 needless deaths but also a state-by-state breakdown of where they could have been prevented.
Between January 2021 and April 2022, about every second person who died from COVID-19 since vaccines became available might have lived if they had gotten the shots, the researchers found. Nationwide, about half of the 641,000 people who have died since vaccines became available could have lived if every single eligible adult had gotten jabbed.
“At a time when many in the U.S. have given up on vaccinations, these numbers are a stark reminder of […]
