Senate panel passes health bill

A Senate committee has approved a bill to reform US healthcare, a key step in President Barack Obama’s attempt to overhaul the system.

Senators voted by 14 votes to nine to pass the bill, with one Republican joining Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee in voting in favour.

Senator Olympia Snowe became the first Republican to back the proposals.

The reforms, intended to cut costs and make insurance more affordable, are Mr Obama’s top domestic priority.

The president welcomed the committee’s decision, calling it a “critical milestone”.

“We are closer than ever before to passing healthcare reform but we are not there yet,” he said. “Now is not the time to pat ourselves on the back… It is time to dig in further and get this done.”
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Lunch debts piling up for school districts

By Emily Bazar, USA TODAY

More children are getting into school lunch lines without being able to pay, creating a financial burden for school districts.

Some schools are toughening their policies — limiting students to two or three unpaid meals, creating payment plans and using collection agencies.

It’s a growing problem that reflects families’ economic struggles nationally, says Dora Rivas, president of the School Nutrition Association.

“When we’re talking to parents, we’re hearing that they lost their jobs, their cars have broken down,” says Sheila Mason of Des Moines Public Schools.
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The triumph of the monthly bill

Subscriptions have succoured media firms during the recession. That may not last

VIACOM, a media conglomerate based in New York, has an unusual response to the downturn: it is launching a television channel. This month Epix will begin showing films from Paramount and MGM, as well as original programmes. It may get off to a slow start, since it has not yet signed up many cable and satellite distributors. But its creation points to one of the media business’s few bright spots.

Having fallen steeply after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the shares of all the big American media companies have outperformed the market since March. But recession has struck some parts of the industry much harder than others, changing its shape. As a rule, media products that are sold in shops—CDs, DVDs and magazines—have suffered. Advertising is showing only tentative signs of recovery. The kind of media for which people pay a monthly bill, in contrast, has not only held up better but has in some instances prospered through the downturn.

Cable and satellite television was a good business going into the recession and is now triumphant. In the year to June 30th Britain’s BSkyB added more subscribers, obtained more revenue from each customer and reported more profit than the year before. Discovery Communications, which derives almost all of its revenue from cable, notched up a 13% increase in profits in the second quarter. In the past year the fortunes of big media groups have depended largely on the proportion of their revenues coming from pay television.
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Winning ways

Prizes for optical fibres, charge-coupled devices, ribosomes and telomeres

HOW do you look through a window that is 100km thick? That, in essence, was the question facing Charles Kao in 1966. For working out the answer, Dr Kao has been awarded part of this year’s Nobel prize for physics. Besides being thick, the window was narrow: it was an optical fibre. Dr Kao’s prize is a belated recognition of his contribution to the telecommunications revolution of the past few decades. But better late than never.

The rest of the physics prize goes almost as belatedly to Willard Boyle and George Smith who, in 1969, ushered the charge-coupled device (CCD) into being, paving the way for the digital camera. The chemistry prize went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for working out the structure of ribosomes—the parts of living cells that translate genetic information into proteins. And the physiology prize went to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for their work on telomeres, the DNA caps that stop the ends of chromosomes either unravelling or sticking to one another.
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Wake up Europe!

It is time for the world’s biggest economy to rise from its slumber and play a global role

A REFERENDUM in a small island off the European mainland about an incomprehensible document sounds dull. Yet Ireland’s vote on October 2nd in favour of the Lisbon treaty marks a milestone for the European Union. The treaty—which, despite a flurry about the Czechs, now looks certain to be ratified—is likely to be the last big piece of EU institution-building for years to come. It also poses serious questions about the world’s biggest economy. Is Europe evolving inexorably into a federation of states? Could it become an economic trendsetter? Will Europe wake up and take a bigger role in the world? Or are the affairs of man to be decided largely in Washington and Beijing, with the new “G2” occasionally copying in the Brussels bureaucracy on its decisions?

Very few of the answers to these questions can be found in the moderately useless Lisbon treaty. It is a deliberately obscure reworking of the draft EU constitutional treaty rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. This newspaper opposed the constitution because it failed utterly to achieve the goals set by the Laeken European summit in 2001: simplification of the rules, a clearer distribution of power between the centre and national governments, greater transparency, bringing the EU closer to voters. That the Lisbon treaty is being driven through despite having been rejected by three out of a total of six referendums, and with ten governments reneging on promises to hold votes of their own, is deeply shabby.
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China’s reverse migration

Li Ya Fang does not look or sound much like a migrant worker.

For a start she has a college degree – she is wearing her university T-shirt when we meet.

But technically she is a migrant working many hundreds of kilometres from home – three days’ train ride from Shanghai, where she went to school.

She is working as a teacher near Pu’er, in Yunnan province in the south-west of China. The Communist Youth League sent her here.

Since 2003 more than 1,400 young people from Shanghai have been sent by the Communist Youth League to the interior of China.

Usually there are about 200 of them each year. This year the figure was nearly 50% higher – 295.

The scheme was oversubscribed – there were about five applicants for each position, which is why they increased the size of the programme.

The financial crisis has made it harder for graduates to find work, and a one year job working in development in the west looks good on the resume.
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Iceland looks to serve the world

Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to retreat back from high octane bubble living to nature.

Fortunately, there is a lot of that nature to retreat to.

It is a breathtaking world of volcanoes, endless prairies and ethereal winter landscapes.

Not, you might think, the most obvious place to stick millions of the world’s computer servers which are, for all their uses, rather less attractive.

But the country now wants exactly that – to become home to the world’s computing power.

Behind all the large internet companies lurk massive and ever growing data centres chock full of servers churning away.

Google for instance is thought to have around a million of the things, but even less IT intensive operations, banks for example, need hundreds of thousands of servers to store all their data.
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What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
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Pop world mourns Boyzone’s Gately

Friends, fans and stars have paid tribute to Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, who has died suddenly at the age of 33 while on holiday in Majorca.

Gately’s bandmates described him as “our friend and brother” and said that he “lit up our lives”.

Boyzone manager Louis Walsh pulled out of Sunday’s X Factor show, where judge Simon Cowell paid tribute to Gately.

A spokesman for Gately’s family attributed his death to natural causes and ruled out drugs and suicide.

Gately was on holiday with his long-term partner Andy Cowles, who was introduced to him by Sir Elton John and his partner David Furnish, and married in a civil partnership in 2006.

Gately’s boy band enjoyed huge success in the 1990s, scoring six UK number one singles.

They reformed in 2007 before embarking on a string of comeback concerts and were planning to release a new album next year.
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Russia economy ‘to shrink 7.5%’

Russia’s economy will shrink by 7.5% in 2009, President Dmitry Medvedev has said – but claimed Kremlin intervention had prevented a worse decline.

Russia, which is heavily reliant on oil exports, has been hit by the sharp fall in energy prices.

Mr Medvedev said the decline was “very serious” and admitted the government had been surprised at how severely Russia had been hit by the crisis.

However the predicted slide in GDP was less than earlier predictions.

“The real damage to our economy was far greater than anything predicted by ourselves, the World Bank and other expert organisations,” Mr Medvedev told Russian television.

But he said that measures to save jobs and stabilise the country’s banking sector had paid off.
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