MIAMI—Beginning in 2016, All Aboard Florida will run 32 departures a day between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach, with service extending to Orlando soon afterwards. With a maximum speed of 125 miles per hour, the trains will complete the 240-mile journey in less than three hours. In South Florida, around the three initial stations, the company will develop 4.2 million square feet of real estate. In Orlando, the terminus will be located at the airport and connect to a new commuter rail line at a sparkling, state-funded $215 million transportation hub.
It’s a big project by any standard, but it looms even larger in historical context. No private intercity passenger rail line has operated in the United States in 30 years — and it has been longer still since a new service was introduced. “You’d have to go back over 100 years to find a significant investment in private intercity rail in the U.S.,” says David Levinson, a transportation analyst at the University of Minnesota. Continue reading The Triumphant Return of Private U.S. Passenger Rail | The Atlantic: CityLab→
Brooklyn’s courthouses are being rocked by the “Williamsburg Effect.”
The influx of well-off and educated white people to trendy neighborhoods such as Williamsburg is rapidly “gentrifying’’ the borough’s jury pool — and transforming verdicts, lawyers and judges told The Post.
It’s good news for prosecutors in criminal cases — and bad news for plaintiffs in civil lawsuits, they said.
The first government examination of a radical new tuition model called “Pay It Forward” was presented to lawmakers in Oregon last week, explaining for the first time how much a state would pay to implement the new system.
The Islam religion was founded by Mohammed in the seventh century. In 622 he founded the first Islamic state, a theocracy in Medina, a city in western Saudi Arabia located north of Mecca. There are two branches of the religion he founded.
The origin of the phrase “You get what you pay for” is sometimes attributed to the fashion mogul Aldo Gucci, who said, “The bitterness of low quality is remembered long after the sweetness of low price has faded.” But when it comes to healthcare, Americans get neither quality nor affordability.
Many BPA-free plastics leach BPA-like chemicals that are potentially damaging to human health, a dilemma Mother Jones explored in our expose on the plastics industry earlier this year. But consumers have had no way of knowing which of the items lurking in their pantries might wreak havoc on their hormones. Until now. A new paper in the journal Environmental Health identifies specific plastic products—including AVENT baby bottles, CamelBak sippy cups, and Lock & Lock food storage containers—that leach estrogen-mimicking chemicals. Perhaps more importantly, it also names a few options that are hormone free. Continue reading Mother Jones: These Popular Plastic Bottles May Be Messing With Your Hormones→
When her second son was born, six weeks premature, Emily Guillermo recalled thinking, “You’re not supposed to be mine. You were not supposed to be made.”
Postpartum depression isn’t always postpartum. It isn’t even always depression. A fast-growing body of research is changing the very definition of maternal mental illness, showing that it is more common and varied than previously thought.
At the end of April, an execution in Oklahoma that went horribly wrong — leaving inmate Clayton Lockett writhing in apparent pain before he eventually died of a massive heart attack — sparked a national debate about the ethics of the death penalty. The media attention has largely been focused on the fact that Oklahoma used a secret combination of untested drugs in its lethal injections. But according to an independent autopsy report commissioned by Lockett’s attorneys, an ineffective cocktail of lethal drugs wasn’t necessarily the biggest problem that night.
In fact, the IV pumping the drugs into Lockett’s body was improperly placed by individuals who may not have been trained about how to insert it correctly.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
NEW YORK – Citizens in the world’s richest countries have come to think of their economies as being based on innovation. But innovation has been part of the developed world’s economy for more than two centuries. Indeed, for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution, incomes stagnated. Then per capita income soared, increasing year after year, interrupted only by the occasional effects of cyclical fluctuations.
The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted some 60 years ago that rising incomes should largely be attributed not to capital accumulation, but to technological progress – to learning how to do things better. While some of the productivity increase reflects the impact of dramatic discoveries, much of it has been due to small, incremental changes. And, if that is the case, it makes sense to focus attention on how societies learn, and what can be done to promote learning – including learning how to learn. Continue reading @JosephEStiglitz: Creating a Learning Society – Project Syndicate→
Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.
The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Health Care and Climate: President Obama’s Big Deals – NYTimes.com→
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