Gin Act 2012?

Alcohol pricing: politics under the influence
2 hrs ago from Guardian.co.uk
The first thing that Britain - like any alcoholic - needs to do is face up to the problem and avoid denial

Modern Britain has a drink problem. We drink too much alcohol. We have too many alcohol-related health problems; and we suffer too much alcohol-related crime. Some 70% of adults drink every week, which may not seem too distressing if it is in moderation, but a quarter of us claim to have been binge drinking at least one day in the past week. Alcohol-related deaths have increased by around 20% since 2001, a shocking trend. Two-thirds of the public believe that the amount people drink in this country is out of control. Two out of three of us claim to have witnessed some kind of alcohol-related crime during the past 12 months. One in 10 - and a quarter of those in the 18-24 age bracket - say they have taken part in it. Only last week pollsters YouGov reported that 40% of Britons identified this country with the word "drunk". But this is not a new association. As long ago as the eighth century, St Boniface wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury to complain that: "In your dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent."

So the first thing that Britain - like any alcoholic - needs to do is face up to the problem and avoid denial. But we also need to face up to the real facts about the problem and not to fall for too many of the myths that can feed wider denial. We also need to take effective actions which actually address the real problem, and not get sidetracked into relatively ineffective actions which address it only at the margins. That is the danger which bedevils the government's attempt to "turn the tide" against binge drinking by imposing minimum unit pricing on alcoholic drinks, announced by the home secretary Theresa May on Friday.

It does not help the public to take this government initiative as seriously as it should when it is so clear that Mrs May's statement to MPs was a political rush job. Parliament does not normally debate major policies on a Friday. In the past decade, as Labour pointed out, there have been only three precedents - the Iraq war, Libya and swine flu. All three were emergencies. But Britain's drinking problem, not least in view of St Boniface's comments 13 centuries ago, can hardly be described as that. The only emergency on Friday was the government's alarm about the so-called "granny tax" continuing to dominate the post-budget headlines through this weekend. That's why ministers turned to drink to drown their sorrows.

Even putting all that to one side, Mrs May's announcement falls some way short of a coherent answer to Britain's alcohol problems. That's largely because it exaggerates the centrality of a binge drinking culture which, while unquestionably important and in need of action, is actually in relative decline, especially among young men. There is also a good case for saying that binge drinking is a relatively less dangerous phenomenon in health terms than other forms of mainly domestic alcohol abuse. Young people actually drink less frequently than older people. And minimum pricing may not be the best way to tackle the undoubted curse of public drunkenness. The well-off managerial and professional classes drink more often and more intensively than those in routine and manual jobs, or than the unemployed. Hitting the poor drinker is part of the answer. But hitting the rich drinker matters as much. And that means nudging as well as nannying the public.

Minimum pricing may well be one way of dealing with part of Britain's drinking problem. But it is doubtful whether it really addresses the problem of juvenile drinking (also in decline), public drunkenness or middle-class drinking, much of which takes place in the home. That's partly because the minimum price per unit is likely to be set too low to have much impact, and partly because it is not matched by a meaningful strategy to deal with the culture of alcohol and health. No one wants to make the best the enemy of the good, but Mrs May's announcement is simply not good enough.

Incentives for Advanced Work Let Pupils and Teachers Cash In

By SAM DILLON


WORCESTER, Mass. — Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students — the “smart kids” — were capable of advanced coursework.

But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom’s school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.

South High students said Mr. Nystrom and his colleagues had transformed the culture of a tough urban school, making it cool for boys with low-slung jeans who idolize rappers like Lil Wayne to take the hardest classes.

They were helped by the National Math and Science Initiative, a nonprofit network that provided laboratory equipment and special training for teachers and organized afternoon tutoring and Saturday sessions. It also paid $100 each to students who scored a 3 or above on the A.P. exam — and to their teachers, who can also earn additional rewards. Because 43 of his students passed the exam this year, far above his target, Mr. Nystrom will add a $7,300 check to his $72,000 salary.

Organizers of the initiative, who met with lawmakers and staff members at a Congressional briefing last month, said that over three years, the program led to nearly 38,000 A.P. exams being taken in math, science and English, many of them by black and Hispanic students. This year, 308 schools in six states are participating.

The initiative’s success is refueling a debate over whether cash bonuses can coax improved performance from teachers and students — a New York City incentive program was disbanded — and whether paying students for schoolwork diminishes their ability to feel intrinsic pleasure in achievement for its own sake.

Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist who won a MacArthur Foundation award last month for his research on educational incentives, said that cash alone did not consistently raise achievement, but that combining payments with tutoring, teacher training and other tactics could be promising.

Of the 1,853 teachers participating in the initiative last year, more than half earned bonuses of at least $2,000, said Gregg Fleisher, a director of the initiative. Brian Leonard, who teaches A.P. calculus and statistics at Lake Hamilton High School in Arkansas, earned the largest award, $12,500, because 65 of his students passed the exams.

Three years ago, Lake Hamilton High had nine A.P. math students, and their parents were all doctors, lawyers or other professionals, Mr. Leonard said.

“I had a boy last year who was your quintessential average rural student: always dressed in camo, his dad was a mechanic,” he said. “He signed up for A.P. statistics, I worked with him, and he came out passing the exam.”

The College Board, which administers the A.P. program, has endorsed the math and science initiative, which is based in Dallas and is financed largely by Exxon.

In a book published last year, “AP: A Critical Examination of the Advanced Placement Program,” some academics expressed concern that under a push by the College Board to broaden its reach, too many unprepared students were taking — and failing — A.P. classes.

But Philip Sadler, a Harvard lecturer who edited the book, said of the effort: “They’re doing the right things and have had substantial increases in the number of kids who pass some A.P. exam. So that’s all good news.”

South High Community, which sits on a hilltop in this gritty town west of Boston, acquired a violent reputation after a Hispanic student stabbed a black classmate to death in 1989. Eighty-five percent of its 1,220 students this year were poor enough to qualify for the federal lunch program. Like many schools, South had previously let students take A.P. classes only they if had passed certain prerequisite courses with high grades and obtained a teacher’s recommendation.

In 2009, the school began working with the math and science initiative, which requires that all barriers to A.P. enrollment be removed. “My initial instinct was that if we let everybody in, it was just going to dumb down the classes,” Mr. Nystrom recalled.

But the school began urging students during announcements to sign up for A.P. classes, making it clear in guidance sessions and in meetings with parents that they were not just for white or middle-class students.

Mr. Nystrom had his own recruitment program. He made tongue-in-cheek posters portraying the rap stars Lil Wayne and Flavor Flav, as well as the male heartthrobs in “Twilight,” endorsing A.P. statistics as the supposed keys to success in life.

Forty-six students enrolled in Mr. Nystrom’s class in 2009, up from 12 the year before, of whom six had earned qualifying scores of at least 3 out of 5. Of the 46 students, 22 earned qualifying scores on exams in May 2010.

Last fall, enrollment surged to 61 students. Forty-three of those passed the exam, and 15, or 25 percent, got the top score. Worldwide, 13 percent of the 143,000 people who took the statistics exam got 5’s this year.

Thirty-one low-income students from Mr. Nystrom’s class passed the exam, more than at any other high school in Massachusetts.

The teacher’s manic energy and persistence may be one reason for his success. In his first-period class the other day, Mr. Nystrom outlined the meaning of basic vocabulary words in statistics — sample, parameter, inference — and then went over nuances.

Using an overhead projector, he drew a contingency table relating the relative preferences of males and females for hip hop, country and indie rock music, then used the table to explain marginal distribution.

Some students struggled to understand the table, and he explained it again — until Ashley Tran, a 15-year-old sophomore, interrupted.

“Oh, I get it!” she exclaimed.

“My favorite sound!” Mr. Nystrom said. Kristopher Santana, 17, a senior whose mother is a customer service representative at a tool company, was among those who scored a 5 in May. He said the 18 hours of Saturday classes organized by the initiative, and Mr. Nystrom’s twice-weekly, after-school tutoring sessions, had been helpful.

And the $100 incentive?

“There’s something cool about the money,” Kristopher said. “It’s a great extra.”

Mr. Nystrom attributed his students’ success to the Saturday classes, the extra training he got and the collective effort by his colleagues to persuade students that hard work can bring success.

“I’d like to think the incentive payments had little impact,” he added. “But maybe way in the back of my mind, I know that if I just push a little harder and work every minute of every class, more students might pass the exam, and I might increase my monetary incentive.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 4, 2011



An article on Monday about a program that pays cash incentives for teachers and students in Advanced Placement classes misstated the number of students worldwide who took the A.P. Statistics test in May. It was 143,000 — not 18,000, which was the number of test-takers who earned a 5, the highest score. The article also misstated the percentage of students worldwide who scored a 5 on that test. It is about 13 percent, not 15 percent.

Report: Cancer is the world's costliest disease

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE (AP)
Cancer is the world's top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death, the American Cancer Society contends in a new report it will present at a global cancer conference in China this week.

Cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other diseases that spread person-to-person, the report concludes.

Chronic diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes account for more than 60 percent of deaths worldwide but less than 3 percent of public and private funding for global health, said Rachel Nugent of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based policy research group.

Money shouldn't be taken away from fighting diseases that spread person-to-person, but the amount devoted to cancer is way out of whack with the impact it has, said Otis Brawley, the cancer society's chief medical officer.

Cancer's economic toll was $895 billion in 2008 — equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world's gross domestic product, the report says. That's in terms of disability and years of life lost — not the cost of treating the disease, which wasn't addressed in the report.

The World Health Organization has long predicted that cancer would overtake heart disease this year as the leading cause of death. About 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2008, and about 12.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year.

Tobacco use and obesity are fueling a rise in chronic diseases, while vaccines and better treatments have led to drops in some infectious diseases.

Many groups have been pushing for more attention to non-infectious causes of death, and the United Nations General Assembly has set a meeting on this a year from now. Some policy experts are comparing it to the global initiative that led to big increases in spending on AIDS nearly a decade ago.

"This needs to be discussed at the UN — how we are going to deal with this" rising burden of chronic disease, said Dr. Andreas Ullrich, medical officer for cancer control at WHO....

World diamond trading group bans Zimbabwe stones

Angus Shaw, Associated Press Writer
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) -- In what's being hailed as an unprecedented move that will boost buyer awareness of blood diamonds, a global diamond trading network vowed Monday to expel any member who knowingly trades gems from two Zimbabwe mines where laborers have been killed and children enslaved.

The announcement by the U.S.-based Rapaport Diamond Trading Network, an industry diamond price and information provider, comes after international regulators declared the stones from the Zimbabwe mines conflict-free, backing off a ban they imposed in November and allowing 900,000 carats of diamonds to be auctioned last week.

"This is the first time that we've heard of a large group like the Rapaport group actually taking such a strong stand," said Tiseke Kasambala, a Zimbabwe specialist with Human Rights Watch.

"Consumers will certainly ask questions" about the stones they are buying, she added.

The international regulators, whose group is known as the Kimberley Process, said the two mines are operating at "minimum" international standards. The Rapaport group, though, said that does not guarantee the stones "free of human rights violations" and vowed to publish the names of members knowingly trading in diamonds from the diamond fields near the eastern city of Mutare....

China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

SHANGHAI — After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday.

The milestone, though anticipated for some time, is the most striking evidence yet that China’s ascendance is for real and that the rest of the world will have to reckon with a new economic superpower.

The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Experts say unseating Japan — and in recent years passing Germany, France and Great Britain — underscores China’s growing clout and bolsters forecasts that China will pass the United States as the world’s biggest economy as early as 2030. America’s gross domestic product was about $14 trillion in 2009.

“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”

For Japan, whose economy has been stagnating for more than a decade, the figures reflect a decline in economic and political power. Japan has had the world’s second-largest economy for much of the last four decades, according to the World Bank. And during the 1980s, there was even talk about Japan’s economy some day overtaking that of the United States....

Central Europe faces massive flood cleanup

By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer
WARSAW, Poland – Swollen rivers surged north Monday in central Europe after carving a swath of destruction across Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated and one monastery suffered the worst flood damage in almost 800 years.
Days of flooding have killed at least 11 people in central Europe and damaged hundreds of homes and businesses.
The southwestern Polish town of Bogatynia, on the border with the Czech Republic, was one of the worst-hit areas. Video from the TVN24 news station showed roads that were torn up, rubble strewn all over and heavy damage to many homes. One house was left tilting badly.
A bridge in the town was also badly damaged, and soldiers had to set up a temporary crossing to bring in food and other supplies.
TVN24 reported that some vendors were taking advantage of food shortages and charging 20 zlotys ($6.60) for a loaf of bread, far above the usual price.
In Germany, the situation was most critical in the state of Saxony, along the Neisse River, which forms the border with Poland. Hundreds of residents had to be evacuated.
"We will have massive damage to the infrastructure, but of course also to private property," Saxony governor Stanislaw Tillich said. He asked Polish authorities to explain how a retaining dam on their side broke down, making the situation worse, the German news agency DAPD reported.
A 775-year-old Cistercian monastery near the Neisse, St. Marienthal, was also flooded and the diocese said the damage will likely reach several million euros (dollars).
"Inside the church, the water was about two meters (6 feet) high," a statement said, calling it the worst flooding since the monastery's founding in 1234....

Many States Adopt National Standards for Their Schools

By Tamar Lewin
Less than two months after the nation’s governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards, 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks.
Their support has surprised many in education circles, given states’ long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum.

The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September.

“I’m ecstatic,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. “This has been the third rail of education, and the fact that you’re now seeing half the nation decide that it’s the right thing to do is a game-changer.”

Even Massachusetts, which many regard as having the nation’s best education system — and where the proposed standards have been a subject of bitter debate — is expected to adopt the standards on Wednesday morning. New York signed up on Monday, joining Connecticut, New Jersey and other states that have adopted the standards, though the timetable for actual implementation is uncertain.

Some supporters of the standards, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, worry that the rush of states to sign up — what Ms. Weingarten calls the “Race to Adopt” — could backfire if states do not have the money to put the standards in effect.

“I’m already watching the ravages of the recession cutting the muscle out of efforts to implement standards,” she said. “If states adopt these thoughtful new standards and don’t implement them, teachers won’t know how to meet them, yet they will be the basis on which kids are judged.”...

The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.

There has always been one major caveat, however, to the research on the fade-out effect. It was based mainly on test scores, not on a broader set of measures, like a child’s health or eventual earnings. As Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist, says: “We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.”

Early this year, Mr. Chetty and five other researchers set out to fill this void. They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.

On Tuesday, Mr. Chetty presented the findings — not yet peer-reviewed — at an academic conference in Cambridge, Mass. They’re fairly explosive.

Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. And just as in other studies, the effect largely disappeared by junior high, based on test scores. Yet when Mr. Chetty and his colleagues took another look at the students in adulthood, they discovered that the legacy of kindergarten had re-emerged.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too....

The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it

by Michael Snyder
The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income...

France: A More Austere Bastille Day

By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: June 23, 2010
In a symbolic cost-cutting gesture, President Nicolas Sarkozy will cancel the annual presidential garden party for Bastille Day, July 14, legislators said Wednesday. The garden party, which was trimmed back last year, nonetheless cost nearly $1 million. Mr. Sarkozy’s spending has been criticized by government auditors.

For Catholics, a Door to Absolution Is Reopened

Think that indulgences are a thing of the past? Is this the counter reformation? Check out this article by Paul Vitello from February 10, 2009 in the New York Times.

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”
In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.
The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation),.....