Thursday, March 01, 2018

The Guardian:
"The risk of dying as a newborn in the US is only slightly lower than the risk for babies in Sri Lanka and Ukraine, according to Unicef.

A report by the UN children’s agency found that five newborn babies die around the world every minute – a total of about 2.6 million a year. The figure was described as 'alarmingly high', not least because 80% of the deaths were from preventable causes. ...

But a country’s income explains only part of the story. In Kuwait and the US, both high-income countries, the newborn mortality rate is respectively 4.4 and 3.7 deaths for every 1,000 live births, only slightly better than Sri Lanka and Ukraine, where the respective rates are 5.3 and 5.4."

-->The NYT often avoids this type of bad news story. What if people started demanding universal healthcare to protect their newborns? CNN did the story, but focused on the most dangerous countries to be born in. 

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Common Dreams:
"Bottled water companies have relied on predatory marketing practices and exorbitant lobbying efforts to sell Americans on the inaccurate belief that pre-packaged water is cleaner and safer than tap water—a notion that is costing U.S. households about $16 billion per year.

In a new report entitled 'Take Back the Tap,' Food & Water Watch explains that 64 percent of bottled water comes from municipal tap water sources—meaning that Americans are often unknowingly paying for water that would otherwise be free or nearly free. A gallon of bottled water costs about $9.50—nearly 2,000 times the price of tap water for municipal taxpayers. ...

The bottled water industry has an enormous environmental footprint, using about four billion pounds of plastic for packaging in 2016—which required an energy input equal to at least 45 million barrels of oil."

-->The big bottling companies use predatory marketing? The NYT doesn't print  anti-corporate stories like this. Most of the US mainstream media didn't cover the report either.

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The Guardian:
"The head of the main United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees has warned that the organisation is facing the most severe funding crisis in its history, threatening its support to an estimated 5.3 million people, including more than 400,000 inside Syria.

Pierre Krähenbühl, commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency, added that cuts in support to the already impoverished and demoralised population his organisation supports – many of them victims of recent conflict – risked radicalising a new generation of young Palestinians.

The UNRWA, which provides education, medical care and emergency assistance to Palestinian refugees, is facing a shortfall of almost one-third of its budget, in large part because of the Trump administration’s decision to withhold much of its funding."

-->The US threatening to starve millions of Palestinians? The NYT didn't print this story. One has to read the foreign press to understand some of the worst crimes of the American empire.