IF YOU ENJOY SR AND FIND IT USEFUL WOULD YOU PLEASE DONATE
When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Wake up Americans. This is where the Republican Party is headed. This is what they are trying to do. How much clearer do they have to make it before the country realizes what the Republicans intend?
The Missouri State Capitol building dome is pictured in Jefferson City, Missouri. Credit: Stephen Emlund / istock / Getty
The Missouri House is advancing a bill aimed at limiting abortion-specific training at both private and public medical schools within the state. Sponsored by Rep. Justin Sparks (R), the bill, HB 2621, also seeks to prohibit collaborations between medical schools in Missouri and clinics located in other states for the provision of such training.
“If a university or research institution is going to be involved in that practice, then there will be essentially a financial penalty on the endowment of such institution,” Sparks told Missourinet.
If Missouri outlaws abortion-specific training, doctors may not have the needed information to act in medical emergencies. Additionally, bills like HB 2621 would likely exacerbate the existing maternal mortality crisis in the state and worsen health care deserts.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the constitutional right to abortion, Missouri activated its trigger ban, effectively prohibiting the procedure except in medical emergencies when “a delay will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment […]
The Republicans and criminal Trump aren’t even trying to hide what they want to do in America. If you vote for any Republican you have no one to blame for what happens to the ending of American democracy but yourself.
Criminal Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban meet in the Oval Office in Washington in 2019. Credit: Szilard Koszticsak /EPA-EFE / Shutterstock / File
The Hungarian prime minister first won power through a democratic election, then proceeded to weaken the institutions of that democracy by eroding the legal system, firing civil servants, politicizing business, attacking the press and intimidating opposition parties and demagoguing migration.
Former President Donald Trump has left no doubt that he’d try something similar in the United States if he wins a second term – so the presumptive GOP nominee will presumably be eager to compare notes when he hosts Orbán in Florida on Friday.
The prime minister isn’t meeting Biden administration officials. (A Biden administration official told CNN’s Betsy Klein that no invitation for a meeting between the current US president and Hungarian leader was extended.) Instead, he’s choosing to meet the man he hopes will again be US president next year. The two men have a long history of mutual admiration. The fact that one of Trump’s first moves since becoming […]
David Campbell, Angela R. Logan, and Michael Moody, Binghamton University | State University of New York | University of Notre Dame | Indiana University - digg
Stephan:
My fundamental problem with money coming from the wealthy is the political donations. It is my view we should have publicly funded elections; it should be illegal, and seriously so, to mix politics and private money in any way because that is what creates the terrible corruption that is eating American democracy alive. I also think this would radically change if our tax structure was not so corrupt. The wealthy should be taxed as they were in the 1950s.
Donations by top 50 US donors fell again in 2023, sliding to $12B — Mike Bloomberg, Phil and Penny Knight, and Michael and Susan Dell led the list of biggest givers.
The top 50 American individuals and couples who gave or pledged the most to charity in 2023 committed US$12 billion to foundations, universities, hospitals and more. That total was 28% below an inflation-adjusted $16.5 billion in 2022, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest annual tally of these donations.
The Conversation U.S. asked David Campbell, Angela R. Logan and Michael Moody, three scholars of philanthropy, to assess the significance of these gifts and to consider what they indicate about the state of charitable giving in the United States.
What trends stand out overall?
David Campbell:As was the case in 2022, more than one-third of these big gifts – $4.4 billion – went to donors’ personal foundations. Another $764.3 million flowed into donor-advised funds. Also known as DAFs, these charitable savings accounts make it possible for donors to reserve assets such as cash, stocks and bonds for […]
Shannon Firth, Health Policy Reporter - Medpage Today
Stephan:
Our healthcare system based on profit not wellbeing, and further complicated by the Republican attempt to control women, has left us with medical deserts, and limited medical care, particularly in Red states, and this has all kinds of implications as this medical report details. If you vote Republican you are voting against the quality of your own medical care. That is the sad truth.
Rates of emergency surgery, serious complications, and hospital readmissions were higher among Medicare patients living in primary care shortage areas, according to a cross-sectional retrospective cohort study of data from 2015 to 2019.
Medicare beneficiaries living in areas with the most severe primary care shortages had higher rates of three types of emergency surgeries compared with those living in areas with the least severe shortages (37.8% vs 29.9%; risk ratio [RR] 1.26, 95% CI 1.17-1.37, P<0.001), reported Sara Schaefer, MD, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and co-authors.
Those in areas with the most severe shortages were also more likely to have serious complications (14.9% vs 11.7%; adjusted RR 1.27, 95% CI 1.12-1.44, P<0.001) and readmissions (15.7% vs 13.5%; adjusted RR 1.16, 95% CI 1.01-1.33, P=0.03), they noted in Health Affairsopens in a new tab or window.
However, beneficiaries in areas with the most and least severe shortages had similar rates of 30-day mortality (5.6% vs 4.8%; adjusted RR 1.17, 95% CI 0.93-1.47, P=0.17) and any complications (25.9% vs 24.5%; adjusted RR 1.05, 95% CI 0.97-1.15, P=0.21).
Putin wants Trump to be elected President, and the Senate and House to be controlled by MAGAts. To achieve this goal, exactly as I and others have predicted, he is having his minions create disinformation websites, claiming to be American, and especially local journalism sites, in order to influence American voters, as this article describes. The bad news is that I suspect this is going to influence millions of low-information MAGAt Americans who don’t want democracy to continue in the United States.
Moscow
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed furtive Russian disinformation efforts, said advances […]
The Affordable Connectivity Program, an initiative that the Biden-Harris Administration began and which provided subsidies that made the internet more accessible to 23 million Americans, is about to expire as Republicans in Congress block further funding. As this article describes this is an issue that goes far beyond social media, and emails. It has enormous implications for telehealth which has become an increasingly important program for rural, largely Republican, areas. And yet these same people will overwhelmingly vote for Republicans and Trump.
Rural America Credit: The Hill
On New Year’s Eve 2021, the federal government launched the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helped over 20 million American households afford internet access with monthly subsidies of $30 (or up to $75 on some tribal lands). But funding for the program is set to run out in April unless Congress acts by Friday—depriving many of those homes of vital resources, especially access to online telehealth.
People in rural communities are more likely to have issues accessing the internet than those in suburban and urban areas, with nearly 25 percent saying internet access is a major issue. But rural areas also face profound shortages of local doctors, which has increased the importance of telehealth, and the CDC has repeatedly found in the past decade that telehealth is an effective tool in helping rural patients manage chronic health conditions such as home-based rehab after strokes and diabetes.
While telehealth services existed before Covid, and were used to reach patients in rural areas, pandemic stay-at-home orders increased access to virtual appointments, and more doctors now use internet-based telehealth to […]
Please read and study this article, I want my readers to stay alive. The evidence about nano plastics polluting our lives just keeps growing. Here is the latest report. As this article makes clear, NEVER, EVER drink water again out of a plastic bottle. You are literally killing yourself by doing so. Buy some kind of drinking vessel with a lid, and fill it before you go out. As the report says, “Avoid microwaving food or beverages in plastic, including infant formula and pumped human milk, and don’t put plastic in the dishwasher, because the heat can cause chemicals to leach out,” Nanoplastics is one of the reasons Americans have a life span five years shorter than most European/Nordic countries or Japan.
A recent study found the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles — 90% were nanoplastics. Credit: mediaphotos / iStockphoto / Getty
People with microplastics or nanoplastics in their carotid artery tissues were twice as likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from any cause over the next three years than people who had none, a new study found.
Carotid arteries, which lie on each side of the neck and carry blood to the brain, can become clogged with fatty cholesterol plaques in a similar fashion as the arteries leading into the heart, a process known as atherosclerosis.
“To date, our study is the first that associated the plastic contamination with human diseases,” said Raffaele Marfella, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Our data must be confirmed by other studies and on larger populations,” said Marfella, professor of internal medicine and director of the department of medical and surgical sciences at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples, Italy, in an […]
I am increasingly concerned as this report describes that a large percentage of Americans simply don’t understand the threat America is under from criminal Trump and his fascist Republican cohorts. They want to end democracy and make the United States a christofascist authoritarian state ruled by Trump. The House is in league with this and so is the ruling cabal in the Supreme Court. The only thing that is going to stop this is voters, and I am just not sure there will be enough of us to win.
Criminal Trump hugs an American flag as he arrives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty
As nationwide polling relating to the 2024 presidential election has caused concern for many who do not want to see another Trump presidency, a new survey suggests that one of the main problems for the Biden campaign is that not enough voters are aware of Donald Trump’s more recent authoritarian outbursts.
The poll suggests that informing those voters of Trump’s rhetoric could help Biden to court more voters.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, examining the survey by a Democratic-aligned group called “Save My Country,” reported its findings in a column he published earlier this week.
The poll was conducted in three key swing states (Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan) that Biden had won in 2024 but that Trump had won in 2016. It discounted respondents who said that they voted for Trump in the last presidential election or that they believed Biden wasn’t the legitimate winner of that contest, focusing solely on the kinds of voters whom the Democratic incumbent […]
