Jonathan Watts, Global Environment Editor - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
As I have been telling readers for decades, all life is interconnected and interdependent. Here finally is data proving this, and giving humanity an alternative to industrial chemical monoculture agriculture. When you interact with anyone in Congress, ask them what they are doing to support this transition. You will find most of them won’t know what you are talking about, but if enough people ask them, and demand they support this trend, they will listen.
Credit: The Guardian
A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10 tillion (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health and ease the climate crisis, according to the most comprehensive economic study of its type.
It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.
Food systems drive a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, putting the world on course for 2.7C of warming by the end of the century. This creates a vicious cycle, as higher temperatures bring more extreme weather and greater damage to harvests.
Food insecurity also puts a burden on medical systems. The study predicted a business-as-usual approach would leave 640 million people underweight by 2050, while obesity would increase by 70%.
Redirecting the food system would be politically challenging but bring huge economic and welfare benefits, said the international team of authors behind the study, which aims to be the food equivalent of the Stern review, the […]
Although it still has millions of followers, with the exception of Pope John XXIII, I have always thought of the Roman Catholic Church as a deeply corrupt, and sexually perverted institution. Now the Church has a new enlightened leader in Pope Francis who is trying to bring the institution he leads into the 21st Century. Not surprisingly, as this report describes, the far-right hierarchy of the Church, especially the American hierarchy, is in growing opposition to what Francis is doing. The same men who for decades looked the other way as thousands of priests reached into the underwear of little boys find the idea of treating LGBTQ Catholics with some respect as offensive to their morals. It is interesting to watch what is happening because those who oppose Pope Francis can’t just vote him out of office.
Pope Francis speaking during the weekly general audience on January 31, 2024 at Paul-VI hall in The Vatican. In December, Francis approved Fiducia Supplicans, a document allowing priests to bless same-sex unions, sparking fury from Catholic traditionalists. Credit: Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / Getty
A group of 90 Catholic clergymen, scholars and authors have published a joint letter to “all Cardinals and Bishops of the Catholic Church,” urging them to oppose a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that allows priests to bless same-sex unions for the first time.
In the letter, the Catholic conservatives say that Fiducia Supplicans, a Vatican doctrine released on December 18 and signed by the Pope, would lead to the blessing of “objectively sinful” relationships. They add that the cardinals and bishops should “forbid immediately the application of this document in your diocese” and “ask directly the Pope to urgently withdraw this unfortunate document, which is in contradiction with both Scripture and the universal and uninterrupted Tradition of the Church.”
The Fiducia Supplicans permits the blessing of those couples not considered […]
Abha Bhattarai and Jeff Stein, Economic Correspondent | White House Economics Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
Most Americans as the polls indicate have very little understanding of how the government works, or what drives the economy. Large numbers can’t even name the three branches of the government, many can’t read or do math above a 5th or 6th grade level. What they do know is grocery prices are higher than they were before the pandemic, and they blame President Biden. To my amazement, these voters think Trump would do better. We are pathetically ignorant as a population. If Biden is going to win in November he, and the Democratic Party, better find a way to effectively inform the populace that Biden cannot control most of the reasons groceries are still so expensive, that he is doing everything he can to bring prices down, and that Trump would, by his own words, be a disaster.
Americans are finally getting a break from inflation, with prices for gasoline, used cars and health insurance all falling over the past year, relieving families and buoying President Biden’s 2024 reelection bid. But prices painfully remain high for one particularly frequent purchase: groceries.
Grocery prices have jumped by 25 percent over the past four years, outpacing overall inflation of 19 percent during the same period. And while prices of appliances, smartphones and a smattering of other goods have declined, groceries got slightly more expensive last year, with particularly sharp jumps for beef, sugar and juice, among other items.
Stubbornly high grocery prices represent a critical drain on the finances of tens of millions of people and remain, along with housing, perhaps the most persistent economic challenge for the Biden administration as it tries to convince Americans the economy is back on solid footing. For all the attention on gas prices and housing, more than two-thirds of voters say inflation has hit them hardest through higher food prices, according to a November 2023 survey by
There is a major negative trend, the falsification of research studies, going on in science, particularly in medicine, that has the potential to sabotage and disrupt a wide range of disciplines, particularly fields where large sums of research funding or profit from sales are involved. As someone who regularly publishes in peer-reviewed scientific journals I first noticed this when the early Ivermectin studies about its effects on Covid were suddenly withdrawn and notices appeared that they were fake. However, I had no idea that more than 10,000 research papers were identified as fraudulent in just one year, 2023. This is a huge problem, as this report describes, and it hinges on journal editors and peer reviewers. Ultimately, of course, it gets down to the two things that are increasingly defining the cultures of the world, lack of integrity and personal profit.
Fake research papers could jeopardize drug development, warn academics. Credit: Westend61 / Getty
Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.
Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.
“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published […]
Mia Maldonado, Reporter - Idaho Capital Sun / The Guardiand
Stephan:
Idaho, like many Republican-controlled states, is a state whose social wellbeing is in decline. Female medical care is greatly diminished. In some areas there are no longer any OB/GYN specialists. In one city, Sandypoint, the only hospital in town no longer offers Obstetrical care. The libraries are under such virulent MAGAt attacks by the Republican legislators and MAGAt citizens that, as this article describes, many librarians are leaving their jobs and, sometimes, the state itself. If one looks across the United States this same diminishment pattern is playing out in all the Red states. Those are just facts, not political partisanship.
Attendees hold books in support of Idaho libraries at the “Idaho Freedom to Read-in” event held at the Idaho Capitol Building on Jan. 13, 2024. The event was organized by the Idaho Library Association, alongside the Meridian Library Alliance, the North Central Idaho Alliance, the Community Library Network Alliance, and Rediscovered Books. Credit: Mia Maldonado / Idaho Capital Sun
Maegan Hanson became a librarian because of her love of reading. Her favorite part of her job is helping people discover their next favorite book.
Hanson is the Buhl Public Library director, doubling as its children’s librarian. She has worked in libraries for more than 15 years, and her library serves rural Idahoans in a region where only 40% of the population has access to Wi-Fi.
But in her one year serving as library director, she said she regularly considers leaving the profession because of the stress and exhaustion she feels from the state’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric against librarians.
Hanson is not alone in this feeling. Through an informal survey, interviews and rallies, many Idaho librarians have voiced a […]
