"Wendell Potter" - Insurers Getting Rich By Not Paying for Care

Published on Friday, April 29, 2011 by PR Watch

http://prwatch.org/news/2011/04/10665/insurers-getting-rich-not-paying-care

by Wendell Potter

If I had stayed in the insurance industry, my net worth would have spiked between 4 p.m. Wednesday and 4 p.m. Thursday last week -- and I wouldn't even have had to show up for work.

I'm betting that just about every executive of a for-profit health insurance company, whose total compensation ultimately depends on the value of their stock options, woke up on Good Friday considerably wealthier than they were 24 hours earlier. Why? Because of the spectacular profits that one of those companies reported Thursday morning.

Among those suddenly wealthier executives, by the way, are the corporate medical directors who decide whether or not patients will get coverage for treatments their doctors believe might save their lives.

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"Jeremy Hance" - Are US Floods, Fires Linked to Climate Change?

Published on Friday, April 29, 2011 by Mongabay.com

http://news.mongabay.com/2011/0428-hance_extremeweather_us.html

by Jeremy Hance

The short answer to the question of whether or not on-going floods in the US Midwest and fires in Texas are linked to a warming Earth is: maybe. The long answer, however, is that while it is difficult—some argue impossible—for scientists to link a single extreme weather event to climate change, climate models have long shown that extreme weather events will both intensify and become more frequent as the world continues to heat up. In other words, the probability of such extreme events increases along with global average temperature.

"There have always been extreme events," Peter Stott, a climatologist from the UK’s Met Office, told Yale360 in a piece on extreme weather and climate change. "Natural variability does play a role, but now so does climate change. It is about changing the odds of the event happening."

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"Robert Weissman" - Corporate America's War on Political Transparency

Published on Friday, April 29, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/29-1

by Robert Weissman

Companies that bid for government contracts should disclose their campaign spending, in order to diminish the likelihood that contracts are a payoff for political expenditures.

The Obama administration has indicated that it plans to impose such a rule, through an executive order. Ideally, the rule would prohibit contractors and lobbyists from campaign spending, but a disclosure standard is a very positive if modest step.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the trade association for big business, however, takes a somewhat different view.

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“Eric W. Dolan” - ACLU defends cancer patient fired for legal marijuana use

Eric W. Dolan

April 28, 2011

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/28/aclu-defends-cancer-patient-fired-for-legal-marijuana-use/

The American Civil Liberties Union urged a U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to reinstate a lawsuit against Wal-Mart and a manager in Michigan for firing an employee who used medical marijuana in accordance with state law.

Thirty-year-old former Wal-Mart employee Joseph Casias used marijuana to treat the symptoms of an inoperable brain tumor and sinus cancer.

Casias was fired in 2009 after testing positive for marijuana. He had been successfully employed for more than five years by a Wal-Mart in Battle Creek and began using medical marijuana after voters approved the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act in 2008.

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“David Usbourne” - 250 die in one day as twisters rampage from Texas to Virginia

David Usborne

April 29, 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/250-die-in-one-day-as-twisters-rampage-from-texas-to-virginia-2276290.html

Search-and-rescue teams were last night hunting for survivors beneath fallen masonry and tangled joists, power lines and fallen trees in towns and hamlets across seven states in the south-eastern US which were ravaged by the worst outbreak of tornadoes seen in almost four decades. Almost 250 people are known to have died.

President Barack Obama, promising help in rebuilding, described the loss of life as "heartbreaking" and called the damage to homes and businesses "nothing short of catastrophic".

Stunned residents of Tuscaloosa in Alabama awoke yesterday to discover a city partly razed by a single killer twister that cut a swath more than a mile wide and may have got close to an F5 level, the highest on the intensity scale. Shopping centres, shops and whole residential neighbourhoods were shredded, reduced to an almost unfathomable jumble of destruction. At least 169 people died in Alabama alone.

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“’Josh Gerstein” - Barack Obama unveils national security team

JOSH GERSTEIN

April 28, 2011

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53890.html

President Barack Obama formally unveiled the reshuffling of his national security team Thursday, including new nominees for Secretary of Defense and CIA director. Yet he also stressed that the new assignments will not bring significant change to the administration’s defense and anti-terrorism strategies.

“I’ve worked closely with most of the individuals on this stage, and all of them have my complete confidence,” Obama said as he announced the nominations during a ceremony moved from the Rose Garden to the East Room due to threatening weather. “Given the pivotal period that we’re entering into, I felt it was absolutely critical that we have this team in place so we can stay focused on our mission. … I cannot think of a group of individuals better suited to lead our national security team during this difficult time.”

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"Andrew Leonard" - Kicking the economy when it is down

The wrong medicine: GDP growth slows to a crawl, in part because of cutbacks in government spending

Andrew Leonard

April 28, 2011

http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/tech/htww/2011/04/28/gdp_report

So it turns out that Americans had a pretty good reason for thinking that the country is headed in the wrong direction: As judged in terms of GDP growth, they're right! The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its preliminary estimate of first-quarter GDP growth on Thursday: a universally disappointing 1.8 percent.

The number was not unexpected and doesn't automatically imply another recession is around the corner. In his press conference yesterday, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke blamed the slowdown on "transitory factors" -- high gas prices, bad weather and an unexpected slump in defense spending. Most analysts seem to think economic growth began to accelerate again in March; one dismissed the first-quarter numbers as merely a "stutter."

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“ENS” - Half of All Americans Breathe Polluted Air

Environmental News Service (ENS)

April 28, 2011

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/28-9

WASHINGTON, DC - The United States has made progress in cleaning up air pollution, but 154.5 million people, about half the population, live where the air is so polluted with smog and particles that it is often dangerous to breathe, the American Lung Association said today.

Sunrise over the Houston Ship Channel. Nearly half the people in the United States, 48.2 percent, live in counties that received an "F" for air quality due to unhealthy ozone levels, finds the report. (Photo by Cam17) In its annual report on air quality, State of the Air 2011, the American Lung Association says that the Clean Air Act is working and warns against legislators who are trying to weaken the law.

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“David Benjamin” - The Tea Party Dialectic of Alan Ladd and Jack Palance

David Benjamin

April 28, 2011

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/28-7

BROOKLYN — There is a vision, I think, in the current political turmoil. I’m beginning to see it, like the great hazy vista that comes onto the movie screen right after the Paramount peak fades out. This vision of America, conjured by the Tea Party and foreshadowed — currently — by the debt-ceiling crisis, grips a nation that wants, needs, aches to return, in some ill-defined way, to a past utopia of frontier individualism.

But how do we get there? And what will it look like when we make it back?

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“Joshua Holland” - The Rent's Too Damn High but It's a Problem With an Easy Solution... If Only

The banking lobby is pushing back against a modest proposal that would ease the squeeze on renters.

Joshua Holland

April 26, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/economy/150756/the_rent%27s_too_damn_high_but_it%27s_a_problem_with_an_easy_solution..._if_only/

A study released this week by researchers at Harvard University found that rents are rising fast, and an increasing number of Americans are forking over half of their gross income or more on rent. It's a big squeeze on struggling households. There is, however, an elegant, simple solution to what is a growing problem. But it's a policy focused on helping individuals, rather than corporate America, and, as you might expect, it has so far languished in Congress under a barrage of lobbying.

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