Free Republic

Black students in New York state are 44 percent more likely than white students to have a teacher rated “ineffective” in math, and 35 percent more likely to have one rated “ineffective” in English, startling new figures from the state Education Department show. The unprecedented analysis stemmed from the results of the statewide teacher-evaluation system, which for the first time required student performance on standardized exams to factor into teachers’ ratings.

Bonn (AFP) - Calls by the Group of Seven (G7) Monday to slash world carbon emissions did little to boost UN climate talks in Bonn, where frustration mounted over the snail-like progress. Groups of countries pleaded for greater efforts to streamline a draft text for a climate pact due to be adopted at a conference in Paris in just over six months. "We are very concerned about the pace of negotiations," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) which are deeply exposed to climate change. "We have not made the big jump...

Sen. Whitehouse: Bring RICO Charges Against Climate Wrongthink By Walter Olson on 6.5.15 Another step toward criminalizing advocacy: writing in the Washington Post, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) urges the U.S. Department of Justice to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change, with the activities of “conservative policy” groups an apparent target of the investigation as well. A trial balloon, or perhaps an effort to prepare the ground for enforcement actions already afoot?

A new $tudy concludes that the upward trend of global temperatures didn't slow this century, contrary to previous analyses that suggested the world is in the midst of a global warming hiatus. That apparent slowdown—which computer models didn’t predict—has been seized upon by those who are skeptical about man-made climate change and sparked debate about how long the pause might last. The latest $tudy, published Thursday in the journal $cience, suggests that previous research wasn’t accurate. The empirical evidence for global warming, they add, isn’t reflected in temperature data alone but a range of other phenomena, including shrinking ice sheets,...

Frank Logusak, a tribal elder in Togiak, a ramshackle settlement of 842 people on Alaska's remote Bristol Bay, is a hunter and a fisherman, a Yupik native who knew the village's last shaman. Logusak is no scientist, but in his 64 years here, he has watched and felt startling changes in the world around him. "It's a problem, the global warming," Logusak says, sitting at a lunch table at the village's public school, where older residents join students for government-subsidised free meals. "Ice used to stay in the bay until May," he says. "It's way different now." From Alaska to...

Feminists on social media have started a campaign called "give your money to women," or "Giveyourmoneytowomen" on Twitter. The point of the campaign is that, according to its creators, men benefit from numerous privileges, including the patriarchy and earning more money than females. For that reason, men should literally give money to women for no other reason than that they are female. Here are just some of the tweets being bandied about on social media:

OPINION/ANALYSIS:Farmers are now the bad guys. President Obama’s administration last week claimed dominion over all of America’s streams, creeks, rills, ditches, brooks, rivulets, burns, tributaries, criks, wetlands — perhaps even puddles — in a sweeping move to assert unilateral federal authority. The New York Times had a wonderful take on the power grab, saying the move “opened up a broad new front for attacks from business interests like farmers, property developers, fertilizer and pesticide makers, oil and gas producers and golf course owners, who contend that the rule would stifle economic growth and intrude on property owners’ rights.” Those, according...

I don't know about for you, but for me, the most inspiring interview of the week occurred when CNBC's John Harwood interviewed presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. It generated a couple of thoughts in my head that I'm confident will be game changers. I'm secretly hoping that the Sanders team will offer me a job as their Chief Economic Consultant, as a result. Here was the part of the exchange that really got my carbon-neutral cruelty-free non-fossil-fueled engine running: Harwood: If the changes that you envision in tax policy, in finance, breaking up the banks, were to result in a more...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. economy went into reverse in the first three months of this year as a severe winter and a widening trade deficit took a harsher toll than initially estimated. The Commerce Department says the overall economy as measured by the gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.7 percent in the January-March period. The revised figure, even weaker than the government's initial estimate of a 0.2 percent growth rate, reflects a bigger trade gap and slower consumer spending. It marked the first decline since a 2.1 percent contraction in the first three months of...

The iconic Mount Everest could see a major loss of its glaciers over the course of this century, according to a new scientific study that its chief author calls the “the first detailed modelling study of all glaciers in the Dudh Koshi basin in the Everest region of Nepal.” The paper, published Wednesday in the journal The Crocosphere, was authored by glacier researcher Joseph Shea and several colleagues from France and the Netherlands. “The biggest result here is that the glaciers in the basin, we find them to be more sensitive to temperature than anyone expected before,” says Shea. To...

In a campaign event last week, Republican presidential frontrunner Jeb Bush exhibited Stage 2 climate denial. Unfortunately, denial of human-caused global warming may be a prerequisite for any viable Republican presidential candidate. Conservative and Tea Party Republicans are the one group of American voters among whom Stage 2 climate denial is the majority position, but they’re also the group that most reliably votes in GOP primary elections. Nevertheless, the scientific evidence supporting human-caused global warming is just as strong as the evidence linking smoking and lung cancer. Last year, the IPCC stated with 95% confidence that humans are the main...

Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,826 in 2015. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, 67 billionaires already own half the world’s assets; by 2100 we’ll have 11 trillionaires, while American worker income has stagnated for a generation. But for the vast majority of the world, capitalism is a failure. Over a billion live on less than two dollars a day. In his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty warns the inequality gap is toxic, dangerous. As global population explodes from 7 billion...

First lady Michelle Obama advised the 2015 graduates at Oberlin that they'll find a world of clamor and conflict that will beset them outside the protected lives they've led in college. And, she told them, they should embrace it. Outside that atmosphere of safety, what Obama referred to as four years of "thoughtful, respectful discussion, debate and late-night conversations," she posited that graduates might find themselves "a little dismayed by the clamor outside these walls: the name calling, the negative ads, the folks yelling at each other on TV." "Today I want to suggest that if you truly wish to...

​Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced new plans to create a subsidized food program for school teachers and other workers in the education sector. Maduro explained that the new program would benefit as many as 700,000 families of education workers, including the children of teachers and professors. The president added that his government is committed to ensuring all teachers are provided with a living wage. Earlier this week, Maduro approved a 50 percent increase in teacher salaries.

Global temperature change observed over the last hundred years or so is well within the natural variability of the last 8,000 years, according to a new paper by a former Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) lead author. Dr. Philip Lloyd, a South Africa-based physicist and climate researcher, examined ice core-based temperature data going back 8,000 years to gain perspective on the magnitude of global temperature changes over the 20th Century. What Lloyd found was that the standard deviation of the temperature over the last 8,000 years was about 0.98 degrees Celsius– higher than the 0.85 degrees climate scientists say...

I see that unions, led by the Service Employees International Union, are out in full force championing the $15 an hour minimum wage. Business leaders scoff at this. The average CEO earns just over 350 times as much as the work force below. Those executives need to come down from the stratosphere and breathe real air. If we truly want to make that happen, how about joining the new $15 minimum wage with a $15 million maximum income? Could CEOs somehow manage to subsist on that? I think so. And then all of us could live pretty comfortably and in...

The world is busy trying to achieve a global warming goal that some think we’re not on course to achieve, and that some scientists worry may not be enough to prevent some troubling scenarios — like significant sea level rise. That goal is limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But there’s another view, embraced by many countries (which tend not to be the big emitters), suggesting that a safer target involves limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees C. Yet that target would be still tougher to achieve, finds a new paper in Nature Climate Change that...

According to the results, 60 percent of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong path. The Princeton Survey Research Associates International underlined that 52 percent of those who identified as Democrats, said they had a favorable view of socialism. 33 percent of Independents shared the view. Among other highlights of the survey, Obama's foreign policy is approved by only 37 percent of Americans and not even one in five like the job Congress is doing. Noteworthy, that fifty percent of Americans say they're open to allowing states to repeal federal laws if half or more of the states, representing...

LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted on Tuesday to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 from the current $9 an hour, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far in the national push to raise the minimum wage. The increase — which the Los Angeles City Council passed in a 14-1 vote — comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages. The impact is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, more than 40 percent of the city’s work force earns less than...