A Financial Times article today points out how difficult U.S. reform of its agricultural programs will be with the collapse of the WTO’s Doha Round. The 2002 Farm Bill expires in 2007, and bringing farm subsidy programs in line with WTO obligations has been a major impetus for reform. Now, without that pressure, prospects are dimming for substantive changes. In fact, farm supporters are calling for an extension of the 2002 legislation instead of a new bill.
Some reformers, like Cal Dooley,…
A new study just
published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows mixed results in dealing
with Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes — the most severe type of
diabetes that requires close monitoring of blood sugar, multiple insulin
injections during the day, and a careful balancing of food.
In the study islets, which are cells
in the pancreas that produce insulin, were transplanted into 36 patients with
Type 1 diabetes. Results showed that the
transplanted cells provided insulin independence for up to two years for some
patients,…
All that stuff written about early
admission college programs being discriminatory, here’s a
new wrinkle on possible “early admission” to sports programs. It seem that girls or women whose ring
fingers are longer than their index fingers are much more likely to be good in
sports.
The new report said that measuring early on the ratio of
those fingers “could help identify talented individuals at a
pre-competitive stage.”
Just think — new tests for junior high sports teams. It’s not how well you play the game; it’s
whether your finger…
The Deutsche Oper in Berlin on Monday cancelled a production of Mozart’s “Idomeneo” because of fears of inciting Muslim protesters to violence. There was a lot of Sturm und Drang as a result. Today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans shouldn’t “bow to fears of Islamic violence.”
If you’re puzzled—no, it’s not the opera itself that’s a perceived problem (whew!). The avant-garde production of the opera includes Idomeneo—the lead character—pulling the bloody heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha from a sack.…
A new study shows that mice that drink moderate amounts of wine everyday suffer from less memory loss and brain cell death. A huge body of evidence has shown that moderate alcohol consumption helps keep people heart-healthy, and CEI had sued for that positive information to appear on alcoholic beverage labels. Now moderate drinking seems to “slow Alzheimer’s-like diseases.”
The happy mice were given Cabernet Sauvignon wine (really!), ethanol, or plain water— their equivalent of two glasses a day. The ones who…
I don’t know how on in the world I end up on some loony email lists, but they’re at least good for the occasional chuckle. For instance, today I got a sales pitch from the far-left book outfit Haymarket Books, proudly hawking the Noam Chomsky book a copy of which Venezuela’s anti-American strongman Hugo Chavez waved at the United Nations last week.
“SPECIAL OFFER: Get Hegemony or Survival before Amazon can ship it and our exclusive Arundhati Roy DVD (not on Amazon)…Buy…
As often happens to successful ventures, Starbucks now faces critics who challenge the company’s leasing contracts, which specify competitors may not occupy the same building. But that’s a sensible business practice for any expanding firm, and there’s always the building next door available to those rivals, anyway. The company is also being attacked for buying out rivals or building nearby stores, as if competition itself were objectionable.
These critics allege that a firm employs “predatory” tactics to drive rivals out of business,…
Wouldn’t you think that a reader’s letter correcting factual
errors in a newspaper article wouldn’t be edited to delete the principal
correction? Well, that’s not necessarily
the case, as my letter
today in the Washington Post’s Health Section shows.
Seems the Post last week ran Q’s
and A’s on the E. coli 0157:H7 outbreaks related to spinach. Unfortunately for consumers, it gave some
incorrect information, namely:
“Since 1995, there have been 19 outbreaks of food-borne
illness caused by E. coli 0157: H7. All have involved lettuce or leafy greens.”
In correcting that,…
Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York City, became a darling of the left by claiming that the Bush Administration tried to censor or suppress his personal opinions on global warming public policy questions. (If they did, they did a poor job.) But Dr. Hansen has quite a record of trying to suppress the expression of opposing views. This summer he refused to testify before a House committee hearing on the grounds that…
Why do liberals always assume that the solution to every
problem is regulation and yet more regulation? That’s the thrust of an
editorial in today’s New York Times that whines: “Congress still has done
nothing to protect Americans from a terrorist attack on chemical plants.” It assumes that Congress has some magical
answer to the issue members refuse to employ because of chemical industry lobbying. It also wrongly claims that nothing has been
done to protect these plants.
Consider the evidence first. All the answers that…
Government is often said to be bedeviled by “unintended
consequences.” That doesn’t mean that
the consequences cannot be foreseen. Two
great examples present themselves this week. First, in Boiling Springs Lake, North Carolina, the endangered red
cockaded woodpecker has been spotted. As
a result, local land-owners have been rushing
for the chainsaws to protect their property investments:
The [Federal Fish and Wildlife Service] issued a map marking
15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that
could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in…
An op-ed
I wrote for last Sunday’s Washington Times
talked about the battle over the interchange fees that banks and credit card
companies charge to retailers. The retailers, including some big chains, are
whining about the fees they have to pay and want the government to step in to
control how much the card companies charge them. This is another example of the
phenomenon described in CEI Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow Tim Carney’s book The
Big Ripoff, in which businesses lobby for big government when it favors
their…
We were all happy to see the World Health Organization
finally take steps to embrace wider anti-malarial
deployment of DDT, but our friend Steve Milloy reminds us it’s hardly a moment to
break out the champagne:
Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement,
however, is the terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead — mostly
pregnant women and children under the age of 5), illness (billions sickened)
and poverty (more than $1 trillion dollars in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the…
You really have to give it to the U.S. Census Bureau. Even when they prove they’re pathologically unable to keep track of important computer equipment containing potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, they’re still able to produce exact data on how many they’ve lost: 672.
California’s attorney
general has sued carmakers DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, Ford and
subsidiaries of Honda, Nissan and Toyota for global
warming impacts on the state. Interesting that the state isn’t trying to
hold individual car owners — the ones who actually drive and produce the
emissions at issue — liable for the alleged damage.
This suit seems rather reminiscent of the lawsuits first filed
by U.S. cities against gun
manufacturers in the late 1990s. Critics at the time pointed out, of
course, that it’s the people who actually shoot the guns who…
In what, for now at least, seems like good news, the
president’s Identity
Theft Task Force has recommended that the federal government stop forcing
citizens to reveal their Social Security numbers to officials and for reasons
that have nothing to do with their Social Security benefits:
Under the plan, the task force urges the government to
review the uses of Social Security numbers as employee identification and
determine ways in which it can conceal or eliminate their use in agency systems
and paper and electronic forms.
[…]
The initial recommendations…
The National Indian Gaming Commission has recently been
getting hot under the collar over a vital matter of native gambling policy -
the display elements and parameters of video
bingo consoles. Apparently they want (among other things) for the video
screen to look more like traditional bingo cards and for the games to be played
more slowly. They’re just old fashioned like that.
Lest you think, however, that these proposed changes are of little importance,
listen to this voice of the Casino-American community, Marjorie Mejia, of California’s Pomo…
Following up on Fred’s
post, here’s an even better headline: “Thai PM cancels U.N. speech after coup”
ran the headline in Reuters. It seems that the prime minister of Thailand was in New York at the United Nations, when word came about a coup by the military who took over the government in Bangkok. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra canceled
his speech scheduled for 7 p.m. before the General Assembly.
Today the Senate
approved for the second time the U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, another in
the now lengthy list of
bilaterals. The Oman treaty also marks further outreach through
trade with Arabic countries that are considered friendly to the U.S. Earlier FTAs
were completed with Bahrain, Morocco, and Jordan. Increased trade and investment between the countries could result — and that would be good.
But already the protectionist veil of “national security”
interests was being spread by Sen. Byron Dorgan, who said in the floor debate that
the agreement…
Hmm — the headline of
today “Thailand has peaceful coup while PM at UN” suggests that we provide free
airfare to the United Nations to as many nations as possible. Add why stop
there? Perhaps, we could persuade all members of Congress and the
Administration to visit those august quarters too. The thought of changing
political leaders on a wholesale basis is one of few encouraging things that’s
been reported recently.
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