In a stunning improvement in children’s health, far fewer children have high lead levels than 20 years ago, a testament to aggressive efforts to get lead out of paint, water, and soil.
Federal researchers report that 1.4% of children in 2004 had high lead levels in their blood, down from 9% in 1998.
“It has been a remarkable decline… a public health success story,” said the study’s coauthor from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Read AP story at LA Times)
A new federal incentive allows car and truck buyers to deduct the sales tax on vehicles purchased between Feb. 17 and the end of the year — just the encouragement some buyers needed to commit to a purchase.
“It’s the first good news the automotive industry has had in long time,” said James T. Fleming, president of the Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association. “I’ve talked to a number of dealers around the state and they said they’ve actually seen an uptick in traffic.” (Read more in the Norwich Bulletin)
“You can’t sit around grumpy, moping and feeling sorry for yourself in this recession,” the retired 76-year-old said. “You’ve got to get off your duff and do something. And what more can you do but open up a retail store to provide quality goods at good prices?
Bill Weisberg opened a discount athletic wear shop called Fabulous Buys in St. Louis Park, Minnesota and hired his grandkids to run it on weekends, convinced that his gamble can help jump-start Minnesota’s limping economy. (Minnesota Star-Tribune)
(Photo courtesy of Sun Star)
Thanks to GraemeThickins on Twitter for the news tip!
President Barack Obama has chosen Kathleen Merrigan, an organic food expert who helped the US Senate develop labelling rules for organic food, to be second-in-command at the Agriculture Department. Sustainable and organic farmers are thrilled that someone who has been associated with these issues her whole career is going to be at such a high level in the department.
The Consumers Union praised the choice. “We would expect her to be a strong defender of USDA’s organic standards, which have been under repeated attack for the last several years,” said Jean Halloran, director of Food Policy Initiatives at the organization.
Merrigan currently is an assistant professor and Director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment M.S. and Ph.D. Program at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Boston.
Two good news stories in the financial sector caught our eye this week:
Hefty stock purchases by company officers and directors is growing evidence that insiders believe their companies have the worst of the recession behind them and their stocks should rise this year, analysts said last week.
A new crop of wind turbines will be generating not only electricity but steady income for refugees of the ravaged housing and automotive industries.
“This is the best job I ever had,” said one of the new ‘windsmiths’ strapping on his climbing gear to perform maintenance on the wind turbines. (McClatchy News, via the Sac Bee)
More info on the Obama administration’s investment in energy, visit the US Dept. of Energy office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Right: Dillon Wind Power Project, CA- photo by Iberdrola Renewables
Biomethane from human waste will soon power public transportation in Norway’s capital city. Starting in September 2009, the methane gas normally contributing to Global Warming, will be captured from one of Oslo’s sewage plants and converted into biomethane fuel to run 200 of the city’s public buses. (Read more at EcoWorldly.com)
Thanks to Brooke Estin for the story tip via Twitter!
(Photo by Seansie via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license)
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday he’s halting federal raids on medial marijuana distributors in the 13 states that allow marijuana use for patients with cancer and other painful medical conditions.
(Read story at MSNBC, or watch the following two videos – one of which shows how a burn victim is helped by the medical marijuana laws in California)
Note: New Jersey is also moving to allow medical marijuana.
Below: AG Halts Medical Marijuana Raids, and, Making the Case for Medical Marijuana
Overwhelmed by a three-fold surge in sales of its hybrid, Honda will increase production of the Insight, which debuted in Japan on February 6. The company plans to launch the gasoline-electric hybrid in Europe and the United States, in its first attempt at a low-cost, high-volume answer to the Prius, over the next two months. (Read more from Reuters)
A German shepherd named Astro who has been missing from his family for more than 9 years is finally home, thanks to the microchip embedded in the dog before his adoption from a shelter. The family had even moved three times after the dog left home. (MSNBC.com has the story)
Traffic on Regent Street in London came to a halt as rock legends U2 performed on a roof top for thousands of commuters.
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“These uncertain times…” It’s hard to go through the day and not see or hear the use of this phrase. But what does it really mean?
What is being described as our modern state is really the norm. We are surrounded by uncertainty all the time.
I heard an authoritative radio voice usher the phrase three times today. “In these uncertain times, it’s important to find a lawyer you can trust.” Well, this had me spitting out my coffee in laughter.
A little while later, it was, “Are you looking for a safe place to invest your money, in these uncertain times?” to which I replied, “What money?”
The Nithi River used to claim as many as 50 lives each year near the Kenyan villages of Kajuki and Mutino.
But a Rotary club project between Meru, Kenya, and Middleton/Manchester, England, helped fund a new bridge that allows villagers to cross the river safely, while transforming the economies of the communities in the process.
Before the bridge was constructed, Mutino villagers had to make a 30 mile roundtrip journey to cross the river at a safe point, making it difficult to reach Kajuki for supplies and medical services. Often in emergencies, villagers would try to ford the river, and many died as a result. (In this photo, Mutino villagers ford the Nithi River during the dry season, courtesy of John Brooker)
131 gharials, the critically endangered long-snouted crocodile native to the Northern Indian sub-continent, were recently re-introduced to the river Ganges by WWF-India officials.
The gharials are responding well, according to WWF, since their release on February 12 into the Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttar Pradesh.
“An estimate indicates that barely 1,400 individuals survive in the wild in India,” said Dr Parikshit Gautam, Director, Freshwater & Wetlands Conservation Program, WWF-India. “For its conservation it is essential to locate viable alternative habitats for this species in crisis.”
Over 40% of breast and bowel cancer cases in rich countries are preventable through diet, physical activity and weight control alone, experts say.
Simple measures like cycling to work and swapping fatty foods for fruit can make all the difference for these and many other cancers, they say. (Read the full story in BBC)
(Photo courtesy of Sun Star)
January car sales plummeted for most major automakers, but Hyundai saw a 14 percent sales jump thanks to their innovative Assurance program that allows buyers to return cars – no strings attached – if they lose their jobs in the first year of ownership. (US News Rankings and Reviews)
What recession?
A Minnesota grain and energy cooperative sent $231 million on Friday to its members — and there’s more on the way — in what they called the largest-ever distribution from a U.S. co-op.
The checks mailed to members of CHS Inc., a Fortune 200 company, ranged from a few hundred dollars to just over $1 million, said a spokeswoman of the co-op, whose earnings have more than tripled in the past four years, selling grain, feed, food, and energy.
Let’s Join! (Full story at Minn. Star-Tribune)
Typically women use 20 percent of their clothes 80 percent of the time. The reason? Sometimes it’s just hard to let go. But, the idea to host clothing swaps between friends or local women is gaining momentum. Suzanne Agasi is the diva of clothing swaps having hosted 175 events while maintaining a website devoted to her events www.clothingswap.org.
“People hold on to clothes that don’t really fit or look good because it was expensive,” she said. “They are painful to get rid of, but it’s time we just let go and give it to a friend.”
Read more about swapping with friends and using Meetup.com on Boston.com.
The today show featured one of her swanky swap parties in this video.
The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that should lead to the easing of restrictions on Cuban-Americans wanting to travel to Cuba. The bill would allow Cuban-Americans to visit Cuba once a year instead of once every three years.
Under the bill, Cuban Americans should be able to spend $170 a day on the island, more than three times the current daily limit of $50. It also creates a general travel licence for Americans who sell food and medical supplies to Cuba. (Read more at BBC News)
More than 106 million of the world’s poorest families received a microloan in 2007, surpassing a goal set ten years earlier, according to a report released last month by the Microcredit Summit Campaign. Microloans are used to help people living in extreme poverty start or expand a range of tiny businesses such as husking rice, selling tortillas, and delivering cell phone services to remote villages.
“This is a tremendous achievement that many people thought was far too difficult to reach,” said Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus who was present for the announcement. “What makes it even more remarkable is that loans to more than 100 million very poor families now touch the lives of more than half a billion family members around the world. That is half of the world’s poorest people.”
Even though microloans were first made in the developing world in the 1970s, for decades, this quiet revolution gained ground largely unnoticed by world leaders and development specialists until the United Nations declared 2005 as the Year of Microcredit and the following year Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize.
At the first Microcredit Summit in 1997, when the ambitious goal was originally set, organizers say that fewer than 8 million very poor clients had a microloan. That number grew by more than 1,300 percent in the ten years that followed, culminating in 2007, when microloans went to 88 million of the world’s poorest women.
The Campaign organized 12 conferences during that period, attended by more than 14,000 delegates examining trends, debating ideas, and sharing innovations. “Spending less than $12 million, the amount of microloans in the hands of the poor expanded from an estimated $1 billion to $15 billion,” said Alex Counts, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, “demonstrating the significant leverage possible when an international campaign is able to mobilize people and institutions on a global scale.”
While the world’s financial markets are gripped by a global economic crisis, microbanking has spread to the most destitute corners of the world, spurred by internet websites like Kiva.org which lets users lend small amounts directly to micro-businesses — with payback rates that traditional banks would envy.
One of the innovators highlighted in the report is Jamii Bora, a Kenyan microfinance institution that started in 1999 with loans to 50 beggars in Mathare Valley Slum in Nairobi and now reaches 200,000 members. Jamii Bora is building a new town that provides another contrast to the current financial crisis by providing sub-prime mortgages to some of the poorest people in the world but does so in a way that gets the fundamentals right. The new town has 2,000 houses and 3,000 business spaces. Each house has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom and the monthly mortgage is the same as a one-room shack in the slums. Potential buyers must have successfully repaid three self-employment loans to qualify for a mortgage. “Every person’s dream is to move out of the slums,” said Jamii Bora’s founder Ingrid Munro, “not patch up the slums.”
Jorimon Khan, who lives in Bangladesh, is one of the clients mentioned in the report. Married in 1962 at the age of 10, Jorimon had her first child at 15. Her family of four lived on her husband’s wages as a day laborer which amounted to less than 20 cents a day. In 1980 she received her first loan of $10 from Grameen Bank and began to husk and sell rice. For the first time in her life, Jorimon Khan and her family were able to eat three meals a day. “At first I was afraid to take the loan,” Khan remembered. “People told me that if I didn’t repay it, the bank people would kill me for the money. So yes, I was very scared. But when I finally paid back that first $10, I felt brave. So I asked for more money. After that I asked for $33.”
In 1980 Jorimon Khan was among the first 10,000 microfinance clients in the developing world. Now Jorimon Khan is one of more than 100 million clients and the Microcredit Summit has set its sights on reaching 175 million of the world’s poorest families by 2015 and ensuring that 100 million of those families move above the $1 a day threshold. (The Campaign counts the world’s poorest as those who live in the bottom half of those living below their nation’s poverty line, or any of the nearly 1 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day.)
Click here to view the 2009 State of the Campaign Report (Also available in Spanish, French, and Arabic).
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is a project of the RESULTS Educational Fund, a U.S.-based grassroots advocacy organization committed to ending hunger and poverty. The Campaign brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit to promote best practices in the field, to stimulate the interchanging of knowledge, and to work towards reaching bold measurable goals. For more information, visit www.microcreditsummit.org.
