Environment
California Readies Expansive New Delta Water Plan
Sunday 01 November 2009 |
An area of land known simply in California as "the Delta" has undergone a rapid decline and this long-term tragedy has spurred state legislators and the governor to take significant measures to save the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast.
California's Delta is circumscribed by the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers system. It contains more than 500,000 acres of agriculture, provides habitat for 700 native plant and animal species and supplies water to more than 25 million Californians and 3 million acres of agriculture. »
Labor
The Massive Job Loss Defense Spending
Monday 09 November 2009 | There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law.In fact, standard economic models do show that measures designed to reduce GHG by raising energy prices will lead to some cost in terms of slower economic growth.
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Women's Issues
Ellen Goodman | What Option for Afghan Women
Saturday 07 November 2009 | Boston - It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. "This is a doctor," she said, pointing to one picture. "This is a teacher." It was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas enforced by their Taliban rulers. Back then, the world had turned a cataract eye on Afghan women. Under virtual house arrest, they were forbidden from work, from school, from walking alone or even laughing out loud. It was arguably the greatest human rights disaster for women in history. »
Health
Anna Deavere Smith
Wednesday 11 November 2009 | PBS Airtime: Friday, November 13, 2009, at 9:00 p.m. EST on PBS (check local listings here).While politicians and the media war over "the public option" and "bending the cost curve," acclaimed actress-playwright Anna Deavere Smith gives voice to questions of life and death, sickness and health care. Bill Moyers speaks with Smith, whose one-woman play, "Let Me Down Easy" - nine years and more than 300 interviews in the making - has been applauded for spotlighting the real-life personal stories of people facing illness and mortality. Anna Deavere Smith has won two Obie Awards, been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and two Tony Awards, and is a recipient of the prized MacArthur Fellowship.
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Education
"Training Citizens Who Are Well-Informed About Scientific Choices"
Thursday 08 October 2009 | An astonishing convergence: A great number of countries, from China to India by way of Europe, worried by the decrease in scientific vocations, have undertaken an overhaul of their teaching of the sciences. With a change in perspective, however. The primary reason invoked to justify these reforms is no longer economic competitiveness, but the necessity of recreating a sort of democratic contract between citizens and scientific development.
Initiating children from the earliest ages in order that - when they have become adults - they may make "well-informed choices" as General Inspector for Physics Florence Robine puts it. She coordinated an issue of the Revue internationale d'éducation (International Review of Education) devoted to "a revival in the teaching of the sciences."
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Voter Rights
2010 Census Faces Challenges on Immigrants, Undercounted Groups
Friday 16 October 2009 | Lawmakers and community advocates continue to work to ensure accuracy in the rapidly approaching 2010 Census. The count will play an important role in determining the amount of dollars flowing to communities across the nation and in the South over the next decade, as well as political representation. But the Census continues to face challenges on several fronts. »
