Friday, December 09, 2005
The government seems to be blind to the inherent incompatibility of its economic and social policies. A report from the New Zealand Institute this week points out that exports currently make up only 29% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is well below international standards, even for other small countries. The Institute says we will have to substantially lift our game if we are to maintain economic growth. In response, Government minister Trevor Mallard says one of the problems is that New Zealand has too few risk takers. Here lies the government blindness. Entrepreneurs take risks only when they think there is going to be a financial return. They do not take risks if they are taxed too heavily when they make a success of the venture. Furthermore, New Zealand does not encourage risk-taking because when people are successful they are criticised for being rich, and the government uses its social redestributive policies to reduce the gap between rich and poor. The government cannot have it both ways. If it wants successful entrepreneurs - and that is the only way the economy will grow - it has to stop slamming them when they achieve. Too many have already voted with their feet and shifted production overseas.
Chinese authorities have admitted for the fist time that organs from executed prisoners are being sold to ailing foreigners. According to the London Times, Huang Jiefu, the Deputy Health Minister, says that the practice is widespread and must be regulated more consistently. The aim of new legislation, says Mr Huang, is to end the commercialisation of organ transplants. It will also improve China’s image and give condemned prisoners a greater say in what happens to their bodies. There are no official figures on the number of official executions in China, but Amnesty International estimates that there are between 3,400 and 6,000.
~ London Times, Dec 3
Therapeutic cloning has taken another body blow with a report in a leading journal that cloned embryos appear to be genetically normal, even though most cloned embryos develop abnormally. The implication is that scientists are still far from understanding the cloning process. The findings also suggest that therapies from therapeutic cloning are not around the corner. “Even if cloned embryos are born, many are not normal and die prematurely,” Wolf Reik, of the UK’s Babraham Institute, told The Scientist magazine. At first embryonic stem cells may look normal, but problems may emerge later on.
~ The Scientist, Nov 29
For a performance in its "winter program," a Wisconsin elementary school has changed the beloved Christmas carol "Silent Night," calling the song "Cold in the Night" and secularizing the lyrics. According to Liberty Counsel, a religious-liberty law firm representing a student's parent, kids who attend Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., will sing the following lyrics to the tune of "Silent Night": Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite, how I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm.
It appears the morning-after pill does not reduce pregnancy and abortion rates. During a panel discussion at the National Press Club's Newsmaker Forum last week, Kirsten Moore, president and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, admitted that the morning-after pill does not reduce pregnancies and abortions as originally touted.
Machines will perform euthanasia on terminally ill patients in Israel under legislation devised not to offend Jewish law, which forbids people taking human life. A special timer will be fitted to a patient's respirator and will sound an alarm 12 hours before turning it off. Normally, someone would override the alarm and keep the respirator turned on, but, if various stringent conditions are met, including the giving of consent by the patient or legal guardian, the alarm would not be overridden.
Chinese authorities have admitted for the fist time that organs from executed prisoners are being sold to ailing foreigners. According to the London Times, Huang Jiefu, the Deputy Health Minister, says that the practice is widespread and must be regulated more consistently. The aim of new legislation, says Mr Huang, is to end the commercialisation of organ transplants. It will also improve China’s image and give condemned prisoners a greater say in what happens to their bodies. There are no official figures on the number of official executions in China, but Amnesty International estimates that there are between 3,400 and 6,000.
~ London Times, Dec 3
Therapeutic cloning has taken another body blow with a report in a leading journal that cloned embryos appear to be genetically normal, even though most cloned embryos develop abnormally. The implication is that scientists are still far from understanding the cloning process. The findings also suggest that therapies from therapeutic cloning are not around the corner. “Even if cloned embryos are born, many are not normal and die prematurely,” Wolf Reik, of the UK’s Babraham Institute, told The Scientist magazine. At first embryonic stem cells may look normal, but problems may emerge later on.
~ The Scientist, Nov 29
For a performance in its "winter program," a Wisconsin elementary school has changed the beloved Christmas carol "Silent Night," calling the song "Cold in the Night" and secularizing the lyrics. According to Liberty Counsel, a religious-liberty law firm representing a student's parent, kids who attend Ridgeway Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., will sing the following lyrics to the tune of "Silent Night": Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite, how I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm.
It appears the morning-after pill does not reduce pregnancy and abortion rates. During a panel discussion at the National Press Club's Newsmaker Forum last week, Kirsten Moore, president and CEO of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, admitted that the morning-after pill does not reduce pregnancies and abortions as originally touted.
Machines will perform euthanasia on terminally ill patients in Israel under legislation devised not to offend Jewish law, which forbids people taking human life. A special timer will be fitted to a patient's respirator and will sound an alarm 12 hours before turning it off. Normally, someone would override the alarm and keep the respirator turned on, but, if various stringent conditions are met, including the giving of consent by the patient or legal guardian, the alarm would not be overridden.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
In the UK, David Cameron will be declared the next Tory leader on Tuesday after winning twice as many votes among party members as his rival David Davis, according to a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph.
"A proposal to pay women in Italy not to have abortions is rapidly gaining momentum as politicians of right and left alike give it their endorsement. The scheme - put forward by the left - comes against a background of mounting pressure from the Roman Catholic church for a rethink of the country's 1978 abortion law. The language issuing from the Vatican has grown stronger in recent weeks with one cardinal describing abortion as "the worst kind of murder". On Wednesday a parliamentary committee gave the go-ahead for a commission of inquiry into the workings of Italy's act, passed at a time when the feminist lobby in Italy was stronger and more active than today. One reason why the latest initiative has gathered support is that it addresses Italy's failure to produce enough children. In 2003 the fertility rate - the number of children per woman of childbearing age - was only 1.27, one of the lowest in the world. A slight increase in recent years has been due to immigrant mothers. The low fertility rate threatens to undermine competitiveness and make Italy's welfare system unsustainable.
Amid growing evidence that some of the tiniest materials ever engineered pose potentially big environmental, health and safety risks, momentum is building in the US Congress, environmental circles and in the industry itself to beef up federal oversight of the new materials, which are already showing up in dozens of consumer products. But large gaps in scientists' understanding of the materials are slowing the development of a regulatory scheme. Equally unresolved is who should pay for the additional safety studies that everyone agrees are needed. At issue are "nanomaterials," made of intricately engineered particles and fibers as small as 1/80,000th the diameter of a human hair. At that scale the laws of chemistry and physics bend, giving familiar substances novel chemical, electrical and physical properties. An estimated 700 types of nanomaterials are being manufactured at about 800 facilities in this country alone, prompting several federal agencies to focus seriously on nano safety. Yet no agency has developed safety rules specific to nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are already being integrated into a wide range of products, including sports equipment, computers, food wrappings, stain-resistant fabrics and an array of cosmetics and sunscreens -- a market expected to exceed $1 trillion a year within a decade. Preliminary studies suggest that most of these products do not pose significant risks in their bulk form or embedded in the kinds of products that so far use them. But the same cannot be said of the particles themselves, which can pose health risks to workers where they are made and may cause health or environmental problems as discarded products break down in landfills. Lab animal studies have already shown that some carbon nanospheres and nanotubes behave differently than conventional ultrafine particles, causing fatal inflammation in the lungs of rodents, organ damage in fish and death in ecologically important aquatic organisms and soil-dwelling bacteria.
Aid agencies and local Christian leaders have warned of a looming crisis in Southern Africa , The Baptist Times reports. Failed rains across large parts of the region, coupled with agriculture and health undermined by widespread HIV, political inertia and inadequate policies mean that millions of people face starvation. Tearfund launched an emergency appeal this week focusing on Malawi and Zambia . Malawi Baptist minister Revd Booker Banda said people in his area now have nothing to plant during the sowing season “because they ate all that was left”.
"It is one Christmas list that is proving too much for even the most determined Santa - a multitude of politically correct clauses has caused a shortage of jolly, bearded fellows in Australian shopping malls. Disillusioned by a growing number of rules imposed by recruiting agencies and shopping centres to guard against litigation, men who have brought smiles to the faces of thousands are reluctantly deciding to call it quits. In some centres they can no longer hand out lollies, pat children on the head for fear of insulting religious beliefs, put children on their laps unless they get permission from parents and they cannot have photographs taken with youngsters unless their hands are in full view. So worried have some Santas become of being sued that they are demanding extra helpers to act as witnesses just in case a complaint is made.
"An industrial revolution is happening in the pit of the Sydney Opera House. Under a new interpretation of WorkCover rules, players in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra can't be exposed to sound levels higher than 85 decibels averaged over a day. This will have implications for orchestral music generally, but its immediate impact is being felt on, of all things, the Australian Ballet's Sleeping Beauty. To avoid any one musician being exposed to excessive sound, the orchestra is working with relay teams of extra musicians: four separate horn sections, four of clarinets, four of flutes, and so on. The orchestra that begins a particular performance isn't necessarily the same one that finishes it. It's a logistical nightmare and an expensive one, adding $100,000 to the ballet's production costs. And all this for a score as lyrical and romantic as Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, never mind the noisily modernist Rite of Spring."
Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs. "The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man's brain and a woman's brain really do work differently," a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday. After analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of 23 men and 10 women, the team found that the sexes use different areas of the brain even when working on exactly the same task.
"A proposal to pay women in Italy not to have abortions is rapidly gaining momentum as politicians of right and left alike give it their endorsement. The scheme - put forward by the left - comes against a background of mounting pressure from the Roman Catholic church for a rethink of the country's 1978 abortion law. The language issuing from the Vatican has grown stronger in recent weeks with one cardinal describing abortion as "the worst kind of murder". On Wednesday a parliamentary committee gave the go-ahead for a commission of inquiry into the workings of Italy's act, passed at a time when the feminist lobby in Italy was stronger and more active than today. One reason why the latest initiative has gathered support is that it addresses Italy's failure to produce enough children. In 2003 the fertility rate - the number of children per woman of childbearing age - was only 1.27, one of the lowest in the world. A slight increase in recent years has been due to immigrant mothers. The low fertility rate threatens to undermine competitiveness and make Italy's welfare system unsustainable.
Amid growing evidence that some of the tiniest materials ever engineered pose potentially big environmental, health and safety risks, momentum is building in the US Congress, environmental circles and in the industry itself to beef up federal oversight of the new materials, which are already showing up in dozens of consumer products. But large gaps in scientists' understanding of the materials are slowing the development of a regulatory scheme. Equally unresolved is who should pay for the additional safety studies that everyone agrees are needed. At issue are "nanomaterials," made of intricately engineered particles and fibers as small as 1/80,000th the diameter of a human hair. At that scale the laws of chemistry and physics bend, giving familiar substances novel chemical, electrical and physical properties. An estimated 700 types of nanomaterials are being manufactured at about 800 facilities in this country alone, prompting several federal agencies to focus seriously on nano safety. Yet no agency has developed safety rules specific to nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are already being integrated into a wide range of products, including sports equipment, computers, food wrappings, stain-resistant fabrics and an array of cosmetics and sunscreens -- a market expected to exceed $1 trillion a year within a decade. Preliminary studies suggest that most of these products do not pose significant risks in their bulk form or embedded in the kinds of products that so far use them. But the same cannot be said of the particles themselves, which can pose health risks to workers where they are made and may cause health or environmental problems as discarded products break down in landfills. Lab animal studies have already shown that some carbon nanospheres and nanotubes behave differently than conventional ultrafine particles, causing fatal inflammation in the lungs of rodents, organ damage in fish and death in ecologically important aquatic organisms and soil-dwelling bacteria.
Aid agencies and local Christian leaders have warned of a looming crisis in Southern Africa , The Baptist Times reports. Failed rains across large parts of the region, coupled with agriculture and health undermined by widespread HIV, political inertia and inadequate policies mean that millions of people face starvation. Tearfund launched an emergency appeal this week focusing on Malawi and Zambia . Malawi Baptist minister Revd Booker Banda said people in his area now have nothing to plant during the sowing season “because they ate all that was left”.
"It is one Christmas list that is proving too much for even the most determined Santa - a multitude of politically correct clauses has caused a shortage of jolly, bearded fellows in Australian shopping malls. Disillusioned by a growing number of rules imposed by recruiting agencies and shopping centres to guard against litigation, men who have brought smiles to the faces of thousands are reluctantly deciding to call it quits. In some centres they can no longer hand out lollies, pat children on the head for fear of insulting religious beliefs, put children on their laps unless they get permission from parents and they cannot have photographs taken with youngsters unless their hands are in full view. So worried have some Santas become of being sued that they are demanding extra helpers to act as witnesses just in case a complaint is made.
"An industrial revolution is happening in the pit of the Sydney Opera House. Under a new interpretation of WorkCover rules, players in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra can't be exposed to sound levels higher than 85 decibels averaged over a day. This will have implications for orchestral music generally, but its immediate impact is being felt on, of all things, the Australian Ballet's Sleeping Beauty. To avoid any one musician being exposed to excessive sound, the orchestra is working with relay teams of extra musicians: four separate horn sections, four of clarinets, four of flutes, and so on. The orchestra that begins a particular performance isn't necessarily the same one that finishes it. It's a logistical nightmare and an expensive one, adding $100,000 to the ballet's production costs. And all this for a score as lyrical and romantic as Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, never mind the noisily modernist Rite of Spring."
Some stark new clinical evidence shows that men and women are just not the same upstairs. "The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man's brain and a woman's brain really do work differently," a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday. After analyzing magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) of 23 men and 10 women, the team found that the sexes use different areas of the brain even when working on exactly the same task.
