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Is a cashless society inevitable?
An RCMP officer holds Canada’s new $100 banknote, which is made from plastic polymer and is designed to last longer and thwart counterfeiters. (Fabiola Carletti/CBC) Sweden and several other countries are experimenting with cash-free transactions, a trend that is fuelling debate about the need for tangible currency.
Readers were quick to offer their two cents onFriday’s editorial about the idea, “The International movement for the end of cash” by CBC’s Brent Bambury.
The majority of commenters were resistant to the idea of a cashless society, citing everything from decreased privacy and higher-tech crime to corporate control and technological vulnerabilities.
- “Without strict laws, too, a cashless society will be one in which you have no fiscal privacy. Far from being more secure, intangible assets that Read more…
Surviving the cashless cataclysm
InSweden, just 3% of the economy is powered by coins and paper money. Public buses don’t accept cash, churches have installed card readers to take donations, and there are even some bank branches that refuse to take your money, opting instead to deal with electronic transfers only.
The European average is 9%, and in theUS, the credit card motherland, the percentage is still more than twice that ofSweden: 7%. If you stop and think about it, though, none of these figures are particularly surprising. With the rise of credit cards and Read more…
Religious violence, abuse growing: world study
WASHINGTON — Religious-linked violence and abuse rose around the world between 2006 and 2009, with Christians and Muslims the most common targets, according to a private US study released Tuesday.
“Over the three-year period studied, incidents of either government or social harassment were reported against Christians in 130 countries (66 percent) and against Muslims in 117 countries (59 percent),” said the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life study.
In 2009, governments in 101 nations, more than half the globe, used at least some measure of force against religious groups. A year earlier only 91 nations had done so, the report said.
As of 2009, more than 2.2 billion people, or nearly a third of the world’s population of 6.9 billion, lived in countries where religious restrictions had risen substantially since Read more…
‘Ice Wars’ heating up the Arctic
Editor’s note: CNN correspondent Kaj Larsen recently visited the Arctic to observe the U.S. naval exercise known as ICEX. His experience is part of the CNN documentary “Ice Wars,” which will air at 8 p.m. ET Sunday on CNN Presents.
(CNN) — On a small, floating piece of ice in the Beaufort Sea, several hundred miles north of Alaska, a group of scientists are documenting what some dub an “Arctic meltdown.”
According to climate scientists, the warming of the region is shrinking the polar ice cap at an alarming rate, reducing the permafrost layer and wreaking havoc on polar bears, arctic foxes and other indigenous wildlife in the region.
What is bad for the animals, though, has been good for commerce.
The recession of the sea ice and the reduction in permafrost — combined with advances in technology — have allowed access to oil, mineral and natural gas deposits that were previously trapped in the ice.
The abundance of these valuable resources and the opportunity to exploit them has created a Read more…
Using a Lab-Grown Trachea, Surgeons Conduct the World’s First Synthetic Organ Transplant
Surgeons working at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have taken a huge step forward for regenerative medicine by successfully executing the world’s first synthetic organ transplant. The donor-less transplant saved the life of a 36-year-old cancer patient, who is doing well now after having received a new windpipe grown from his own stem cells.
This story is about as international as it gets: The Eritrean patient, Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene, was pursuing his doctorate in geology in Iceland when his trachea was consumed by an inoperable tumor that grew so bad that it was actually blocking his breathing. So 3-D scans of his windpipe were sent to scientists at University College London, which crafted a glass scaffold that was a perfect match for Beyene’s trachea Read more…
Britain in list of countries ‘most at risk’ if an asteroid strikes
Britain has been identified among a host of countries scientists believe would be worst affected in the event of an asteroid strike.
Experts at Southampton University have drawn up a league table of countries most likely to suffer severe loss of life or catastrophic damage should a large asteroid hit Earth.
The list is largely made up of developed nations including China, Japan, the United States and Italy, on the basis that the size of their populations would mean millions of deaths.
The US, China, Indonesia, India and Japan are most in danger on this basis. Canada, the US, China, Japan and Sweden are rated most at risk in terms of potential damage to their infrastructure.
The report comes after a rock the size of a house came within 7,500 miles of Earth earlier this Read more…
EU ministers scramble to deal with cucumber crisis
EU agricultural ministers Monday struggled to come to terms with a deadly bacteria outbreak suspected of stemming from contaminated cucumbers that has already killed 12 in Germany.
“One problem with Spanish cucumbers, and all of Europe is trembling,” Belgium’s minister Sabine Laruelle said on the sidelines of an informal meeting in Debrecen, eastern Hungary.
At least 12 people have died in Germany following an outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) found on imported cucumbers.
And several hundred more are being treated in hospitals for the highly virulent strain of bacteria, which can result in full-blown haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), a disease that causes bloody diarrhoea and serious liver damage and which can result in death.
Around Europe, other cases — real or suspected — have been reported in Denmark, Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, France and Switzerland, all of them apparently stemming from Germany.
Dutch agriculture minister Henk Bleker said Read more…
New study: Nations requiring the most vaccines tend to have the worst infant mortality rates
(NaturalNews) A new study, published in Human and Experimental Toxicology (http://het.sagepub.com/content/earl…), a peer-reviewed journal indexed by the National Library of Medicine, found that nations with higher (worse) infant mortality rates tend to give their infants more vaccine doses. For example, the United States requires infants to receive 26 vaccines — the most in the world — yet more than six U.S. infants die per every 1000 live births. In contrast, Sweden and Japan administer 12 vaccines to infants, the least amount, and report less than three deaths per 1000 live births.
The authors of the study, Neil Z. Miller and Dr. Gary Goldman, conducted a literature review to determine the immunization schedules for the United States and all 33 nations with better infant mortality rates than the United States. The total number of vaccine doses specified for infants aged less than one year was then determined for each country. The 34 nations were then organized into data pairs consisting of total number of vaccine doses specified for their infants and infant mortality rates. A scatter plot of the data pairs provided evidence of a positive correlation: infant mortality rates and vaccine doses tend to increase together.
Nations were also grouped into five different vaccine dose ranges. The mean infant mortality rates of all nations within each Read more…
Researchers find superbug gene in New Delhi water
By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
LONDON – A gene that can turn many types of bacteria into deadly superbugs was found in about a quarter of water samples taken from drinking supplies and puddles on the streets of New Delhi, according to a new study.
Experts say it’s the latest proof that the new drug-resistance gene, known as NDM-1, named for New Delhi, is widely circulating in the environment — and could potentially spread to the rest of the world.
Bacteria armed with this gene can only be treated with a couple of highly toxic and expensive antibiotics. Since it was first identified in 2008, it has popped up in a number of countries, including the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and Sweden.
Most of those infections were in people who had recently traveled to or had medical Read more…
Nuclear Disaster ‘Will Have Political Impact as Great as 9/11’
A combination photo showing an explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant on Monday.
The nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima plant following Friday’s earthquake and tsunami has led to anxious questions in Germany about the safety of its own nuclear reactors and is putting the government under intense pressure to rethink its decision to extend plant lifetimes by an average of 12 years.
German media commentators across the political spectrum are saying the accident in a highly developed nation such as Japan is further evidence that nuclear power isn’t safe. One Read more…
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