On Tuesday, the rusty patched bumblebee became the first wild bee in the continental United States to be placed on the U.S. endangered species list. Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, scientists hope the designation will help safeguard one of the small insects that play a big role in American agriculture and the environment.
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From: MeNeedIt

Grumbling Venezuelans were lining up for scarce gasoline across the OPEC nation on Wednesday, due to mounting oil industry woes in the country with the world’s largest crude reserves.

Venezuela, which also has the world’s cheapest gasoline, has wrestled with intermittent gasoline shortages in recent months, especially in the central coastal area.

Long lines were reported in capital Caracas, which is unusual, and the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz on Wednesday.

Dozens of cars could be seen snaking into streets and some service stations were shuttered.

“I can’t find 95 octane gasoline anywhere. And we’re an oil-producing country! It’s pathetic,” said Jose Paredes in Caracas’ wealthy Altamira district.

The waits heap extra hardship on the nation of 30 million, where many already jostle for hours in hot lines for food and medicines amid product shortages caused by a brutal economic crisis under leftist president Nicolas Maduro.

State oil company PDVSA’s new head of trading blamed the shortages on problems with internal shipping of products and vowed the issue would be solved soon.

“We’re strengthening deliveries to the center of the country to stabilize gasoline supplies,” Ysmel Serrano tweeted.

Industry Woes

The gasoline shortage comes as new top executives are appointed at PDVSA, largely from political and military quarters, and increasing problems in Venezuela’s oil industry.

As of March 22, about a dozen tankers were waiting around PDVSA ports in Venezuela and the Caribbean to discharge refined products, components, and diluents crucial for oil blending, Reuters vessel tracking data showed.

Backlogs and payment delays to PDVSA’s suppliers, which are now demanding to be prepaid, sometimes mean shippers wait weeks to deliver oil products.

And many tankers are idle because PDVSA cannot pay for hull cleaning, inspections, and other port services, according to internal documents and Reuters data.

Union leader Ivan Freites, a PDVSA critic, said Venezuelan refineries, which have been at around half capacity for months amid outages, only had oil inventories for around two days versus a standard of 15.

“To solve this immediately, we would need deliveries from at least 10 tankers,” he said.

In Venezuela’s industrial city of Puerto Ordaz, the problem has been increasing this week and National Guard soldiers were trying to maintain order at operational service stations.

“We’ve been working extra hours, opening before 6 a.m and closing after 11 p.m. because of the lines,” said Caura service station manager Felix Rodriguez, tired and with blood-shot eyes, adding he had not been given a reason for the slow deliveries.
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From: MeNeedIt

Dozens of German companies including Siemens attended meetings in Bolivia this week to discuss building a coast-to-coast railway through Brazil, Bolivia and Peru that could speed up the export of corn and soybeans to Asia, German and Bolivian officials said on Wednesday.

The massive, $10-billion project would involve building a 3,700-kilometer (2,299 miles) rail line across the continent, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, through mountains and jungles.

“This is the project of the century,” said Germany’s State Secretary of German Transport, Building and Urban Development Rainer Bomba.

Representatives from Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia as well as Germany and Switzerland are still studying the feasibility of the train route, which would drastically shorten shipping routes from Brazil’s coast to Asian markets for key commodities.

Siemens, Europe’s top engineering group, participated in the meetings “to get more information about the project,” spokesman Dennis Hofmann said in an email.

“The project is at an early stage and questions have to be clarified,” he wrote.

The discussions, on Tuesday and Wednesday, come after a similar, Chinese-led project build a trans-South America railway ran into roadblocks late last year due to cost and environmental concerns.

Bolivian and German officials did not name other companies that attended the meetings, but Bomba said: “The presence of 40 German companies here demonstrates that Germany is not only in the planning phase, but also in the realization phase.”

Bolivia’s Public Works Minister Milton Claros told Reuters Bolivia and Germany had signed agreements for technical assistance and financing for the project. The ministry said the project would connect the Brazilian port of Santos to the Peruvian port of Ilo and had a preliminary cost estimate of $10 billion.

Brazil is expected to export 28 million tons of corn and 61 million tonnes of soybeans in the 2016/17 crop year according to the USDA. It is the world’s largest soybean exporter and second-largest corn exporter.

China and Peru agreed in 2015 to study a 3,000-mile-long railway through the Andes, but Peru balked when China estimated its cost at $60 billion. Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski later said the rail should go through Bolivia.

Land-locked Bolivia has long pined for a corridor to the Pacific, blasting Chile for taking its coastline in a war in the late 19th century and maintaining its Navy on Lake Titicaca.

Brazil had also questioned the Chinese project and would likely back the Bolivian route, a member of the Brazilian delegation said.

“We identified problems in the reports made by the Chinese group. We communicated the points of disagreement to Chinese authorities and we are seeing how we can continue the studies,” said Joao Carlos Parkinson, coordinator of economic affairs at Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, who attended the meetings.

Brazil’s Ambassador to Bolivia Raymundo Santos said talks would continue.

“Our delegation confirmed Brazil’s interest in participating,” he said. “The political side has been resolved, but now the technical work has to move forward.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Google Maps users will soon be able to broadcast their movements to friends and family — the latest test of how much privacy people are willing to sacrifice in an era of rampant sharing.

The location-monitoring feature will begin rolling out Wednesday in an update to the Google Maps mobile app, which is already installed on most of the world’s smartphones. It will also be available on personal computers.

Google believes the new tool will be a more convenient way for people to let someone know where they are without having to text or call them.  The Mountain View, California, company has set up the controls so individuals can decide with whom they want to share their whereabouts and for how long — anywhere from a few minutes to indefinitely.

But location sharing in one of the world’s most popular apps could cause friction in marriages and other relationships if one partner demands to know where the other is at all times. Similar tensions could arise if parents insist their teenagers turn on the location-sharing option before they go out.

Some share concerns

It could also be turned into a way to stalk someone entangled in an abusive relationship, warned Ruth Glenn, executive director for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “It has the potential to be another tool in an abuser’s toolkit,” she said.

Similar tracking is already available on other apps; Glympse, founded by former Microsoft employees, has offered this function for years. Although it isn’t as wide-ranging, Apple also offers a tracking option called “Find My Friends” on its iPhone, iPad and Watch.

That’s one of the reasons Google isn’t expecting a lot of complaints about adding the option to Maps, especially since everyone can decide when to turn it on and who can monitor them.

“We don’t feel like we are changing the game,” said Jen Fitzpatrick, Google’s vice president of maps.

Tracking only a tap away

Maps users will be able to activate the location-sharing feature by tapping a button near the search bar and then picking a person from their contact list to text with the information. If the recipient doesn’t have the Google Maps app on their phone, it will text them a link to open the location on the map in a browser.

The settings also allow users to determine how long their movements can be tracked each time a location is shared. If no time limit is selected, Google will periodically send people email reminders that they’re still sharing their location, a step that Glenn said may help anyone who didn’t know an abusive partner was still following them.
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From: MeNeedIt

Rising rates of superbug tuberculosis (TB) are threatening to derail decades of progress against the contagious disease, experts said Thursday, and new drugs powerful enough to treat them are few and far between.

TB kills more people each year than any other infectious disease, including HIV and AIDS. In 2015 alone, it is estimated to have killed 1.8 million people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

While some new antibiotics with the potential to treat some drug-resistant strains are becoming available for the first time, experts who conducted a global study said that without accurate diagnostics, better case tracking and clear treatment guidelines, their effectiveness could rapidly be lost.

“Resistance to anti-tuberculosis drugs is a global problem that threatens to derail efforts to eradicate the disease,” said Keertan Dheda, a University of Cape Town professor who co-led research published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal. “Cure rates for drug-resistant TB are poor and people can remain infectious.”

TB is a bacterial infection normally treated with a combination of antibiotics. But extensive overuse of antibiotics worldwide has led to a rise in drug-resistant “superbug” strains. Bacteria can acquire many drug-resistance traits over time, making several types of antibiotics ineffective.

Some 1 in 5 cases of TB are now resistant to at least one major anti-TB drug, the researchers found.

Around 1 in 20 are classed as multidrug-resistant (MDR) — meaning they are resistant to two essential first-line TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin — or extensively drug-resistant — meaning they are also resistant to fluoroquinolones and second-line injectable drugs.

Approximately half of global cases of MDR-TB are in India, China, and Russia, but migration and international travel have allowed these highly drug-resistant strains to emerge in almost every part of the world.

In a commentary on TB in the same journal, David W. Dowdy, a specialist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States, warned that over the next decade, “it is quite possible that we will see a drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic of unprecedented global scale.”

He added, however, that it might also be possible for the global health community to bring about “an unprecedented reversal” of the drug-resistant TB problem.

“The difference between these two outcomes lies less with the pathogen and more with … whether we have the political will to prioritize,” he said. “Drug-resistant TB is not standing still; neither can we.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Tyrannosaurus rex and his buddies could be on the move as a new study proposes a massive shake-up of the dinosaur family tree.

Scientists who took a deeper look at dinosaur fossils suggest a different evolutionary history for dinosaurs, moving theropods such as T. rex to a new branch of the family tree and hinting at an earlier and more northern origin for dinosaurs.

The revised dinosaur tree makes more sense than the old one, initially designed more than a century ago based on hip shape, said Matt Baron, a paleontology doctoral student at the University of Cambridge in England. He is the lead author of the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

“If the authors are correct, this really turns our longstanding understanding of dinosaur evolution upside down!” Kristi Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalaster College in Minnesota who wasn’t part of the study, wrote in an email.

Dinosaurs are split into two groups. One group has bird-like hips and is called Ornithischia. It includes the stegosaurus. The group with reptile-like hips is called Saurischia, and includes the brontosaurus.

Theropods, which include T. rex and the type of dinosaurs that later evolved into modern-day birds, were considered an offshoot from the group that includes the brontosaurus. The new study moves them to the group that includes the stegosaurus, but on a different branch.

“It means that animals that we’ve always thought were very closely related to each other might not be,” said Rogers, who praised the study, saying it prompts a whole bunch of new questions.

Baron and colleagues looked at 450 characteristics of 75 dinosaur species. They used computer simulations to try to group together those with similar characteristics, creating tens of thousands of potential dinosaur family trees. The proposed one combines the 80 most likely scenarios, he said.

It may sound like an academic exercise, but it’s important to understand how big animals changed with time, Baron said, noting that the dinosaurs ruled Earth for more than 150 million years.

His research suggests that dinosaurs popped up 247 million years ago — 10 million years earlier than the standard theory says — with a dinosaur from Tanzania in East Africa. It’s called Nyasasaurus, was 6 to 10 feet tall and a plant-eater.

He also found an animal that’s not quite a dinosaur, but as close as you can get, that is a reptilian ancestor. And it was in Scotland. Previous theories pointed to dinosaurs first evolving out of the Southern Hemisphere, and many outside scientists said there wasn’t enough evidence to support Baron’s northern concept.

The paper is already dividing dinosaur experts. Famed dinosaur expert Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago called the basis of the Baron family tree “weak” and said “the central question the paper leaves unanswered for me is ‘Why?’”

Matthew Carrano, dinosaur curator at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, said it’s hard to side with any theory because early dinosaur fossil records are so incomplete.
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From: MeNeedIt

Doctors at a Chicago-area hospital have successfully operated on a baby from Africa born with a parasitic twin and having four legs and two spines.The girl, known only as “Dominique” from Ivory Coast, is recovering well from the delicate and groundbreaking March 8 surgery and is expected to live a normal, fully-functional life.

Advocate Children’s Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, Tuesday announced that the 10-month-old, being cared for by a local foster family, underwent six hours of surgery involving dozens of healthcare providers and five surgeons, including pediatric specialist Dr. John Ruge.

“This is a situation where identical twins failed to separate. And, they can be connected in a variety of different manners,” said Dr. Ruge.

Baby Dominique was born with her parasitic twin’s waist, legs and feet growing out of her back. She was also born with two spines. Without surgery her life would likely not be a long one with deformity and pain. Her heart and lungs were working to support the equivalent of two bodies.

“It’s as if the twin, from the waist down, had been attached to the back of Dominique’s neck. And, there was a pelvis and bladder, and functional legs that moved, and feet coming out of the back of Dominique’s neck. Now, this made it extremely dangerous for Dominique.”

Doctors used scans and imaging to create a three-dimensional model of her two spines. A second bladder behind the extra limbs had to be removed.

The team of surgeons performed a mock operation to prepare for the surgery performed March 8 and lasting six hours, which involved disconnecting nerves and blood vessels to prevent numbness or paralysis.

“So, we took her to the operating room,” said Dr. Frank Vicari, who was also part of the team. “We approached the problem, the critical part being at the base of the junction of two spines and the abnormal pelvis. And, once we had control of that, I think it was pretty clear to most people in the operating room that we were going to be able to accomplish this surgery.”

All that remains is part of an abnormal bone that stabilizes her spinal column. Dominique was able to sit up the next day and was discharged five days later, although she still has two intertwined spines. But, doctors do not believe that will hinder her from having a long and productive life. It is hoped she will be reunited with her family in Ivory Coast next month.
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From: MeNeedIt

Twenty-three-year-old Radiya Ahmed Rufai is about to deliver her first child. But she has developed pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy disorder that leads to a sharp rise in blood pressure.

The doctors at Yusuf Dantsoho Memorial Hospital in the central Nigerian state of Kaduna are racing to prevent Rufai from falling into eclampsia — that’s when the pre-eclampsia advances to a level that can induce seizures.

“She was referred from another hospital to this place, with nothing to show that she was having those treatments [for pre-eclampsia]. It was here that we found out she had high blood pressure,” explains Dr. Hassan Shuaibu, a general practitioner in the hospital’s obstetrician and gynecology department.

 Across Nigeria, maternal health workers are trying to improve maternal mortality. But the figures are alarming: in 2015, there were an estimated 814 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in Nigeria, according to the World Health Organization. About half of those deaths were caused by two conditions: uncontrolled bleeding after childbirth, or postpartum hemorrhage, and pre-eclampsia.

Cultural norms

Rufai lies on the hospital bed, whimpering and shivering with pain. She’s careful not to shout out. In this part of Nigeria, cultural norms surrounding pregnancy expect women not to shout during labor — doing so would be a sign of weakness and a woman who is not able to suppress her expression of discomfort while in childbirth could face ridicule from her peers. So, women here put on a brave face, even during a difficult labor.

Rufai’s labor is getting worse. Her blood pressure is rising and her unborn infant is releasing meconium, a type of infant stool, in the amniotic fluid. It’s a telltale sign that the baby is distressed.

Across the ward, 32-year-old Aisha Suleiman is breastfeeding her day-old baby. It’s her seventh child. With her previous pregnancies, Suleiman experienced postpartum hemorrhaging. This delivery was no different. She lost about three pints of blood. The hospital was able to transfuse blood to her.

Lack of access to medicines

Even though, maternal mortality worldwide has decreased by nearly half in the last 15 years, Nigeria still faces a heavy burden, leading the world in the total number of maternal deaths per year. In 2015 alone, 58,000 Nigerian women lost their lives to pregnancy and childbirth-related causes.

The Nigerian Association for Reproductive & Family Health (ARFH) and the international NGO, PATH, revealed in a 2016 study how a lack of access to three basic medicines is increasing the threat of Nigeria’s two most deadly pregnancy complications: postpartum hemorrhage and pre-eclampsia/ eclampsia.

In 2012, the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children determined that the medicines to prevent and treat these two conditions — oxytocin and misoprostol for post-partum hemorrhage and magnesium sulfate for pre-eclampsia/eclampsia — should be made affordable and promoted for use by the global health community. But Nigerian hospitals do not always have these medicines available. And when they are available, the quality is not reliable due to poor storage and regulation.

“As of March 2016, there were 13 oxytocin products and four magnesium sulfate products registered in Nigeria that had not yet been judged to meet international quality standards. This increases the risk that maternal health products are poor or unknown,” the 2016 study reveals.

“It’s time to work hand in hand with advocates, the government, suppliers, and donors to improve the quality and availability of maternal health medicines, reduce counterfeits, and ensure that all women receive the care they deserve,” says Kehinde Osinowo, the director of programs at ARFH.

Many complications

Back at Yusuf Dantsoho Memorial Hospital, health workers are treating other complications. They’ve successfully administered magnesium sulfate to manage Rufai’s pre-eclampsia.

Sitting across from Suleiman is Hajia Muhammed in a white long hijab. She’s about to deliver twins but one of them is in a dangerous bottom-down position known as breech. Muhammed will need a cesarean section. There’s also a young woman who is HIV positive. She delivered a baby boy just hours earlier. The doctor examines him to check if the mother transferred the virus.

In the examination room, nurses scrub with antibacterial soap and hot water. They walk to the beds and kneel over women lying on their backs. Rufai waddles in and goes to a bed. The nurses want to check to see if she may be able to deliver vaginally.

The results come back negative. Her pelvis is too tight. The fetus is too stressed.

They wheel her into the operating room, with Muhammed.

Shuaibu heads the surgical team. He says that many of the Caesarean operations could be avoided with proper antenatal care.

“Most of our women don’t go for antenatal and we only see them when there are complications,” Shuaibu says. “Even if they come for antenatal, you give them medication to take, they often don’t understand why they need to take it. Poverty is another thing because they don’t have money to continue with the medication until they deliver.”

The surgeries are completed in under an hour and the women go to the recovery room. Rufai has given birth to a girl and Muhammed’s twin’s rest in the arms of elderly relatives.

The day ends at Yusuf Dantsoho Memorial Hospital’s maternity ward with no major complications.
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From: MeNeedIt

Oil prices dipped on Wednesday as rising crude stocks in the United States underscored an ongoing global fuel supply overhang despite an OPEC-led effort to cut output.

Prices for front-month Brent crude futures, the international benchmark for oil, were at $50.79 per barrel at 0451 GMT, down 17 cents, or 0.3 percent, from their last close.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were down 18 cents, or 0.4 percent, at $48.08 a barrel.

“Crude oil prices fell as concerns over rising U.S. inventories resurfaced,” ANZ bank said on Wednesday.

U.S. crude oil inventories climbed by 4.5 million barrels in the week to March 17 to 533.6 million barrels, the American Petroleum Institute (API) said late on Tuesday.

“The American Petroleum Institutes’ crude inventories stuck the knife into crude overnight, coming in at a 4.5 million barrel increase against an expected increase of 2.8 million barrels,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at futures brokerage OANDA in Singapore.

“If the API stuck the knife in, tonight’s EIA Crude Inventory figures may twist it. A blowout above the 2.1 million barrel increase expected, may well torpedo oil below the waterline,” he added.

Official U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) oil storage data is due on Wednesday.

The bloated storage comes as U.S. oil production has risen over 8 percent since mid-2016 to more than 9.1 million barrels per day (bpd), levels comparable to late 2014, when the oil market slump started.

Rising production in the United States and elsewhere, and bloated inventories, are undermining efforts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut output and prop up prices.

“OPEC’s market intervention has not yet resulted in significant visible inventory draw-downs, and the financial markets have lost patience,” U.S. bank Jefferies said on Wednesday in a note to clients, although it added that the cutbacks would likely start to show by the second half of the year if OPEC extends its production cuts beyond June.

Despite cuts, analysts warned of renewed or ongoing oversupply in coming years, especially as U.S. shale producers ramp up and once OPEC returns to full capacity.

U.S. bank Goldman Sachs warned its clients in a note this week that a U.S. shale led production surge “could create a material oversupply in 2018-19.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and that infamous factory of cheese, The Gong Show, died at 87.

Barris died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris’ family.

Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with The Dating Game, hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.

Future celebrities

Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett, introduced as “an accomplished artist and sculptress” with a dream to open her own gallery.

After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included The Newlywed Game, The Parent Game, The Family Game and even The Game Game.

At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows.

The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.

Patterned after the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show that was a radio hit in the 1930s, the program featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show’s equivalent of vaudeville’s hook. The victims would then be mercilessly berated by the manic Barris, with a hat often yanked down over his eyes and ears, and a crew of second-tier celebrities.

Occasionally, someone would actually launch a successful career through the show. One example was the late country musician BoxCar Willie, who was a 1977 Gong Show winner.

Known as

He called himself “The King of Daytime Television,” but to critics he was “The King of Schlock” or “The Baron of Bad Taste.”

As The Gong Show and Barris’ other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million in 1980 and decided to go into films.

He directed and starred in The Gong Show, a thundering failure that stayed in theaters only a week.

Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in two months. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin.

The book (and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney) were widely dismissed by disbelievers who said the creator of some of television’s most lowbrow game shows had allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have spent his spare time traveling the world, quietly rubbing out enemies of the United States.

“It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years,” quipped CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. “Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd,” Crispell added.

Barris, who offered no corroboration of his claims, was unmoved.

“Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?” he once asked.

Wrote a book

Seeking escape from the Hollywood rat race, he moved to a villa in the south of France in the 1980s with his girlfriend and future second wife, Robin Altman, and made only infrequent returns to his old haunts over the next two decades.

Back in the news in 2002 to help publicize “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” Barris said his shows were a forerunner to today’s popular reality TV series.

Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Charles Barris was left destitute, along with his sister and their mother, when his dentist father died of a stroke.

After graduating from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1953, he took a series of jobs, including book salesman and fight promoter.

After being dropped from a low-level job at NBC, he found work at ABC, where he persuaded his bosses to let him open a Hollywood office, from which he launched his game-show empire. He also had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record Palisades Park, which was recorded by Freddy Cannon.

Barris’ first marriage, to Lynn Levy, ended in divorce. Their daughter, Della, died of a drug overdose in 1998. He married his third wife, Mary, in 2000.
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From: MeNeedIt

Led by cutbacks in China and India, construction of new coal-fired power plants is falling worldwide, improving chances climate goals can be met despite earlier pessimism, three environmental groups said Wednesday.

A joint report by the groups CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace follows a warning this week by two international agencies that the world needs to shift quickly away from fossil fuels to curb global warming. Environmentalists were dismayed by President Donald Trump’s U.S. government budget proposal last week that would cut spending on renewable energy.

Construction starts for coal-fired plants in China and India were down by 62 percent in January from a year earlier while new facilities starting operation declined 29 percent, according to the report. It said older plants in the United States and Europe are being retired at a record pace.

‘Global climate goals’

The latest developments “appear to have brought global climate goals within feasible reach, raising the prospect that the worst levels of climate change might be avoided,” said the report.

It acknowledged “the margin for error is tight” and said sustained progress will require China and India to scrap more than 100 coal plants on which construction has been suspended. And it warned that countries, including South Korea and Indonesia, are failing to develop renewables, which could increase their need for coal power.

In a separate report, the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said falling power demand in Japan means most of the 45 new coal plants the country has planned will likely never be built.

The reports mark a shift in sentiment from six months ago, when environmentalists warned governments were doing too little to carry out the Paris climate accord. Signed by 170 countries, it calls for holding global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) in hopes of preventing sea level rise and other drastic change.

Biggest greenhouse gas emitter

China, the biggest greenhouse gas emitter, said at that time its coal use would rise until 2030. But later data showed the peak passed in 2013 and consumption is falling.

Countries including China, Germany, India and Japan are moving away from coal as alternatives get cheaper, said Tim Buckley, the IEEFA’s director of energy finance studies.

“I don’t think Trump can stop that,” he said.

Despite such changes, the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to a new high last year and is increasing, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Asia alone is expected to account for 70 to 80 percent of the global growth in coal-fired power capacity over the next two decades.

Industry experts cautioned that countries including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam need to keep adding coal power because it is the only affordable option in a region where 500 million people lack access to electricity. The cost of solar and wind have fallen by up to 80 percent in some markets, but in places such as Bangladesh or parts of China it can still be double that of coal.

“We have to meet the basic needs of people while pushing for energy transition at the same time,” said Yongping Zhai, an adviser on energy to the Asian Development Bank. “You will need a mixture of different fuels. Coal will be there. You cannot avoid it.”

Canceled half its plans

China canceled half its planned additional coal-fired generating capacity over the past year but will still add 100 gigawatts by 2020, according to Xizhou Zhou, who heads the Asian gas and power practice for IHS Markit, a research firm. He said Asian countries are due to add 180 gigawatts out of a global total of 210 gigawatts.

“It’s true that we are seeing a slowdown in coal plant additions, but that doesn’t mean that demand will stop increasing or that they won’t need to build coal plants,” Zhou said.

In China, construction of power plants totaling more than 300 gigawatts was suspended following last year’s release of the latest five-year economic development plan, according to the CoalSwarm report.

On Saturday, Beijing’s last major coal-fired power plant was shut down under plans to switch the Chinese capital to gas and other power sources.

China’s power demand is cooling due to official efforts to reduce reliance on heavy industry and encourage services and technology, said Zhou. He said that might lead to higher demand in India or Southeast Asia if manufacturing of products such as smartphones that require glass, metal and other energy-intensive components migrates there.

“You have a lot of countries that could become a new manufacturing hub but still rely on coal-fired power,” he said.

No new coal-fired capacity

India’s government said in December it needed no new coal-fired capacity until at least 2027. But industry leaders expect work to resume on power projects that have been suspended.

Analysts also warn India is just setting out on a vast and energy-hungry process of building highways and other infrastructure, while China has completed that cycle.

“What happens in India is still an open question,” said Navroz Dubash of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi think tank. “It’s important not to switch from the point of view that coal is inevitable to coal is unnecessary. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

In Japan, the amount of power generated from coal should fall by 40 percent from 2015 levels by 2030 due to lower demand and more use of alternative sources, the IEEFA report said.

“The economic arguments will win out,” said Paul Fisher, an economist at Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainable Leadership. “Once the financial sector sees that it’s not in their interest to finance fossil fuels, we’ll get there.”
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From: MeNeedIt

“This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system, but it moves us decisively in the right direction.”

Those were the words of then-President Barack Obama just after the U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 to overhaul the nation’s health care system seven years ago this week.

“This is what change looks like,” Obama added.

From President Harry Truman in 1948 to President Bill Clinton in 1993, making healthcare affordable to all Americans had been a struggle. Efforts to reform the complex, patchwork health care system, marked by skyrocketing costs and unaffordable insurance premiums, failed.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), widely known as “Obamacare,” was designed to grant access to health care to millions of uninsured Americans.

Reform meant cobbling together the interests of politicians, for-profit hospitals, medical professionals, insurance and pharmaceutical companies — not to mention ordinary Americans.

Obama staked his first term in office on health care reform; it became his signature issue shortly after taking office in 2009.

From the start, the backlash was immediate. After winning passage of the bill — without a single Republican vote — then House minority leader John Boehner warned, “If we pass this bill, there will be no turning back….It will be the last straw for the American people.”

Opposition to Obamacare also prompted this nasty outburst during a joint address before Congress in September 2009.  

South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson accusation “You lie!”  was unprecedented. Wilson later apologized, but received a formal reprimand by his colleagues in the House nonetheless. 

That vehement opposition to the ACAwould come back to haunt the White House in 2016, when business mogul and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump made the repeal of Obamacare a key part of his platform.

Individual mandate

Among the most controversial parts of the former president’s bill was a measure that penalized Americans who did not buy into a so-called online health care exchange to buy insurance. 

Here’s how the Obama administration explained it on its own ACA website:

“If you can afford health insurance but choose not to buy it, you must pay a fee called the individual shared responsibility payment. (The fee is sometimes called the “penalty,” “fine,” or “individual mandate.”)”

One of the main promises of the bill, which did not go into effect until 2014, was affordable insurance premiums. Under Obamacare, adult children are allowed to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans until the age of 26, and insurance companies are barred from refusing to cover people with “pre-existing conditions.”

But the reality of the cost of Obamacare ended up being far less simple than that — and political opposition grew as some people who signed up for Obamacare found their premiums were far more expensive than expected. 

Once in place, it also was unclear as to exactly how many Americans who previously were not covered now had insurance because of the ACA.

Estimates on the number of Americans who remained uninsured after Obamacare went into effect ranged from 20 million to more than 31 million, depending on who was calculating and how.

The website Obamacare Facts, run by Media Solutions, an independent group that claims to have no ties to any political party, states the following:

“The ACA has increasingly reduced the uninsured rate each year, 20 million plus is a good current answer to how many are covered between all coverage provisions. The specifics change based on what report we are discussing, what methodology they are using, and what demographics are being considered.”

Uphill task of repeal

President Trump has stood by his promise to roll back Obamacare, calling the legislation “a mess.”  

Even before his swearing-in back in January, Trump acknowledged the difficulty of doing so, and even said he is considering keeping parts of the ACA intact, in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal. 

Trump made the same policy shift during an appearance on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which aired three days after the November election.

​

Obamacare is still in effect.

But, earlier this month, Republicans introduced its replacement: the American Health Care Act, and after sharp criticism from some conservatives, have offered modifications.

Still, most experts agree the president and the Republican Party are going to make changes — perhaps little by little, and not in one sweeping legislative gesture, as predicted by former Republican House Speaker and Trump adviser Newt Gingrich. 

“I think this bill has to be seen as the first of three or four bills and, therefore, it will not satisfy someone who wants a full blown repeal,” Gingrich said during an interview on The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast. 

“But to get something thru [sic] the Senate with 52 senators, I think you have to write a narrower bill, and try to come back this fall and write a bill that can get 60 votes.”
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From: MeNeedIt