Baltimore Sun

The New America Foundation recently estimated that America needs to create nearly a million jobs a year just to keep pace with population growth, ...

... months after the needle biopsy incident, I read Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Annapolis author Shannon Brownlee. ...

"It's a very expensive way to create jobs - pretty much any other kind of government spending will create more jobs," said William Hartung, a defense budget expert at the nonpartisan New America Foundation in Washington. At a Pentagon briefing, ...

Summer has arrived in Baltimore, and so has summer school -- bringing with it a chance for students who improve on their High School Assessment exams to pocket something more than academic success. A few months ago, Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso unveiled a controversial proposal to improve city schools: Pay students to perform. It's a simple idea that has generated quite a bit of controversy from purists who cringe at the thought of paying students to learn and from… more

Pollution Bill Attacked (The Baltimore Sun)

...Environmentalists, scientists, public health experts and alternative energy companies also pledged their support for the Global Warming Solutions Act during a Senate hearing yesterday. The supporters argue that state limits are necessary to spur federal action and will help to prevent deadly floods and economic chaos brought by climate change. ...

...Former California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Terry Tamminen said costs for most customers and businesses would go down because regulations created by the state would encourage conservation.… more

More Money, Less Health (The Baltimore Sun) 

A few years ago, health journalist Shannon Brownlee was going through some global health statistics. She noticed that even as U.S. health care costs were rising steadily, Americans were not getting healthier. How to explain this apparent paradox?

Brownlee became fascinated and began to collect data in search of answers. The result is Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, her analysis of how American health care has… more

Over the past century, assassinations of heads of state and other prominent leaders such as the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Rabin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the Middle East have shifted the course of history one way or another.

The full consequences of yesterday's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto remain to be seen. But some experts worry what impact the event will have in an era where conflict driven… more

At Camp David, Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin held secret talks that led to a historic peace between their nations.

On the banks of the Wye River, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to give back part of the West Bank in return for concessions from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Now, Annapolis becomes the third Maryland locale to take a turn in the international spotlight as a venue in the long search for peace in the… more

With a proposed Mideast peace conference in Annapolis only weeks away, the lofty goals outlined by President Bush seem to be fading beyond reach, with the meeting likely to be scaled back to a single day, according to senior U.S. officials and outside analysts.

The conference, originally expected to be set for late November, might not be held until mid-December, a State Department official hinted yesterday. Bush's spokeswoman called preparations for the conference "tenuous right now." ...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice… more

With their efforts to win more government funding stymied in Washington, medical researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere are taking their lobbying campaign on the road -- and into the presidential campaign.

The doctors and scientists plan to raise the profile of their issue by advertising and organizing in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. It is the latest move in an effort to reverse an erosion of federal funding for… more