Ïîïóëÿðíûå ñîîáùåíèÿ

понедельник

Bad news for bivalves comes this week from scientists studying ocean acidification.

Ocean water in parts of the world is changing. Its chemistry is very slowly becoming more acidic, like lemon juice, and less alkaline, a la baking soda.

The change so far is small — you wouldn't notice if you swam in the ocean or even drank it (not recommended, in any case). But numerous scientific studies show that it could get worse. One reason is that as humans produce more carbon dioxide, a lot is absorbed into the oceans. That makes the water more acidic.

i

Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013. Rick Friedman/Nature hide caption

itoggle caption Rick Friedman/Nature

Eastern oysters in South Kingston, RI on July 25, 2013.

Rick Friedman/Nature

The Salt

How Climate Change Is Changing The Oyster Business

So, shellfish. Why is this bad news for them, and the $1 billion industry devoted to them in the U.S.?

Well, anything that builds a shell depends on calcium compounds in water. If water gets too acidic, it interferes with the chemistry of shell-building. So oysters, mussels, scallops and lots more will suffer in an increasingly acidic ocean. Crabs and lobsters and coral reefs will feel it as well, but mollusks are most vulnerable.

According to research published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, you can already measure the harmful effects on shellfish in places like the Pacific Northwest.

The study is billed as the first analysis of how shellfisheries in 15 states in the U.S. are likely to fare as this acidification continues. With 17 authors from 13 academic, government and environmental institutions, it examines not just ocean chemistry but local coastal pollution and how that combines with acidification.

And the news for the mollusk industry, as we said, is bad, though not without hope.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Some of the coastal areas could see damage from acidification within a few years. Southern Maine and southern Massachusetts are hot spots, as are estuaries along the East Coast, like the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. The latter are suffering from a lot of nitrogen pollution already from agricultural and sewage runoff. That pollution exacerbates the effects of acidification.

The study also points to the Gulf of Mexico as particularly vulnerable, in part because so few species of shellfish are harvested there. The more diverse the species, the study authors argue, the better chance a few will be resistant to the Gulf's changing chemistry.

Environment

Underwater Meadows Might Serve As Antacid For Acid Seas

The study also points to coastal communities in New Jersey, Virginia and Louisiana that have relatively less monitoring of ocean acidity under way.

The hopeful note in the research is that there are solutions short of stopping the emission of carbon dioxide into the air. Reducing local nitrogen pollution in rivers and bays along the coasts is one. Raising shellfish where the ocean is less affected is another. There may also be strains of oysters that are resistant to acidity.

"There is plenty we can do to help these at-risk communities while protecting the environment," Lisa Suatoni, an ecologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and one of the authors, said in a statement.

shellfish

oceans

climate change

The Obama administration has blocked health plans without hospital benefits that many large employers argued fulfilled their obligations under the Affordable Care Act.

Companies with millions of workers, mainly in lower-wage industries such as staffing, retailing, restaurants and hotels that hadn't offered health coverage previously, had been flocking toward such insurance for 2015.

Plans lacking substantial coverage of hospital and physician services don't qualify as "minimum value" coverage under the law and so do not shield employers from fines of $3,000 or more per worker, the Department of Health and Human Services said late Friday.

Shots - Health News

Many Big Employers Plan To Offer Skimpy Health Options Despite Law

The move closes what many saw as a surprising loophole, first reported by Kaiser Health News in September, that let companies bypass the health law's strictest standard for large-employer coverage while at the same time stranding workers in sub-par insurance. Employees offered such plans would have been ineligible for tax credits to buy more comprehensive coverage in the law's online marketplaces.

Shots - Health News

Employers Can't Skip Insurance Coverage For Hospitalization

The agency did decide to allow such plans for this year only if employers had signed contracts by Nov. 4.

However, it also granted relief to workers offered such coverage, saying they may receive tax credits according to their income to buy more comprehensive insurance in the online exchanges. Ordinarily, employees offered coverage qualifying as minimum value aren't eligible for the subsidies.

Despite what Washington and Lee University law professor Timothy Jost called "a lot of pushback" from employers, HHS has now followed through on earlier guidance that it intended to disallow such coverage.

A plan without hospital benefits "is not a health plan in any meaningful sense," the agency said in a large batch of regulations issued Friday. Scoring such a plan as minimum value "would adversely affect employees (particularly those with significant health risks) who understandably would find this coverage unacceptable. ..."

The ruling ends a debate that erupted last summer over HHS' official, online calculator for determining minimum value in a large-employer plan.

The Affordable Care Act does not specify "essential health benefits" in large-employer plans, such as hospitalization and drugs, as it does for individual and small-business insurance. Instead, the minimum-value test requires large companies to cover at least 60 percent of expected medical costs.

One way to certify a plan as minimum value is to plug its components — benefits, deductibles and so forth — into the official calculator. Many were shocked to learn that the calculator gave passing scores to plans with no inpatient hospital coverage.

Now HHS is saying: Ignore the calculator. Large-employer plans must pay for substantial amounts of hospital care no matter what.

"What remains a mystery is whether the calculator was at fault," Alden Bianchi, a lawyer who advises many companies that were considering such plans for 2015, said via email. "The regulators don't say. Rather, they take the [position] (not unreasonable or nutty, in my view at least) that a plan with these services is not real health insurance."

Even with its allowance for companies that had signed contracts by Nov. 4, HHS stopped short of employer pleas for more flexibility. Industry groups wanted a green light to temporarily offer plans without hospital benefits if companies had made substantial preparations to do so but hadn't signed a deal.

It's unclear how many firms will offer such coverage for 2015. Nearly half of the 1,600 employer members of the American Staffing Association, which employ 3 million temporary employees on any given day, had committed to offer or were considering the plans last fall before KHN reported that regulators were moving against them.

While some members followed through and adopted such coverage, most did not, said Edward Lenz, senior counsel for the association, a trade group of temp and recruiting firms.

Calculator-approved plans lacking hospital benefits are comparatively rich in outpatient services such as doctor visits. Consultants selling the coverage had argued it was a good first step for lower-wage, high-turnover employers that had never offered major-medical insurance.

"I've had a couple discussions in the last several days with clients who were interested but disappointed they were too late to install them for 2015," said Edward Fensholt, a benefits lawyer with brokers Lockton Companies. Other companies "leapt on them," he said.

For employers that planned to offer such coverage but hadn't pulled the trigger by Nov. 4, "this is very disruptive news," Bianchi said. "Best I can recall, I have about a half dozen clients that are in this position."

Anne Lennan is president of the Society of Professional Benefits Administrators, whose members process claims for self-insured employers. "A very small number of non-hospital plans were implemented by my members — as a percentage of all the plans they administer," she said in an email.

Affordable Care Act

Health Insurance

Hospitals

воскресенье

The rain that fell on Hollywood as the hours of red-carpet coverage wore on may have provided one of the evening's best visuals: actual people running around wearing plastic bags as they guided famous people out of limos, under umbrellas and to the waiting microphones of interviewers who wanted to know who made the dress, the shoes, the jewelry. It was literally the packing up and encasing of humanity to keep reality out: what could be more Oscars than that?

Hopes were high for host Neil Patrick Harris, who has extensive experience at shows like the Tonys and Emmys, but who had the Oscar stage for the first time (in a year when he had a significant role in a significant film, David Fincher's Gone Girl). Oscar hosting is usually the most thankless of thankless tasks: the best-case scenario is that everyone says you were fine, and the worst-case scenario is that they're still talking ten years later about how you bombed.

Harris opened with a "Hollywood's best and whitest" joke in an effort to defuse the unavoidable fact that it was going to be a very white night of major nominees (a very male night as well in most of the categories in which it could be, though that's a separate thing), but he immediately turned away from it in what was probably a smart choice: he did a musical number. Billy Crystal used to do this too, but he didn't have NPH's Tony experience. The number relied heavily on green-screen stuff that can't have meant as much to people in the room, but it beat trying to come up with a joke about everyone in the room.

Over the course of the night, Harris did a lot of intentionally awful puns (introducing Reese Witherspoon as an actress you could eat up ... with her spoon) and other cheap-date stuff (praising Channing Tatum as "the real deal, pants down — hands down"). He mostly avoided setup-punchline jokes, going for sillier wordplay and pretty much giving up on a traditional monologue. It's the kind of thing that can work, but it when it deflates, it deflates a lot.

Harris' use of a running gag in which his Oscar predictions were locked in a case backstage seemed ill-advised from the get-go, though, and he started to mispronounce names (most notably Chiwetel Ejiofor and David Oyelowo, both of whose names he had time to practice, quite frankly, and the latter of which he mispronounced twice). Then there were some not-great jokes, and it started to feel a little shaky. (The locked-case gag might have paid off if they didn't wind up trying to pay it off after midnight.)

The speeches can always be counted on, however, for some variety, and they got off to a feisty start as supporting actor winner J.K. Simmons of Whiplash decided to make the most of his platform and spent his (terrific) speech encouraging everyone to call their parents. Not because of acting: just because.

But for a while, the tension seemed like it was going to come from a rare standoff between winners and the orchestra tasked with gently playing them off the stage so the whole thing isn't six hours long.

After Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel grabbed a couple of awards for its distinctive style (for both costume design and makeup/hairstyling, to which it would later add best production design), the director of best foreign language film Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski, gave a speech that ran long enough that the orchestra began to play him off. But he ignored them, and when he mentioned wanting to dedicate the award to his late wife, they quite understandably stopped playing, and he went on for a bit longer. (This all could have been much worse: one year, the orchestra was playing people off with the music from Jaws. Would not have been hilarious.)

Only a bit later, the directors of the winner for best documentary short, Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, were speaking when they began to be played off as well. When one of them, Dana Perry, mentioned that her son had committed suicide, the orchestra sheepishly stopped again. For early in the show, this was a lot of awkwardness, and it set a strange tone of discomfort, particularly when Harris followed up with a semi-naughty "balls" joke about the pompoms on the shoulders of Perry's dress. Not the best timing, perhaps. And this was where it began to feel like a party that wasn't going well.

Harris tried for some jokes at the expense of the spectacle at hand, like a reference to the items in the reported $160,000 gift bags some received, ending with, "And an armored car ride to safety when the revolution comes." But he seemed unable to do anything with the format except do what hosts have been doing at the Oscars for years: struggle to get to "doing okay," lucky to be dismissed as kind of dull.

Often, though, the awards themselves give the best momentum and the best reasons to watch. Winning for Boyhood, Patricia Arquette used her speech to talk about equal rights for women, and suddenly — without any more thanks, without so much as a "good night," she was being led off the stage. It wasn't clear that she wasn't done speaking, but it also wasn't clear that she was. There's a long history of speeches being used to bring issues to light; it was curious to see this one end so abruptly right when Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez were wildly cheering for it. (This moment was The Jubilation That Launched A Thousand GIFs.)

There were winners in a variety of categories that get less attention: The Oscar for visual effects went to the team from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, a film that was released to enormous anticipation and hasn't had quite the impact some expected. Perhaps the most popular movie to win a major award was Big Hero 6, the winner of best animated feature. Over in documentary feature, the award went to Citzenfour, the film about Edward Snowden. There were those who expected sound and technical awards to go to American Sniper, but Whiplash won best sound mixing. Sound editing did, however, go to American Sniper's Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman, who previously won for director Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima. One of the bigger awards, film editing, went to the editor of Whiplash, which was by then putting on a pretty good show.

And the only award anybody thought Selma had a real chance to win, it did win, for the song "Glory," just after a stirring performance from Common and John Legend. They followed with a speech citing current civil rights struggles, including voting rights and incarceration.

Some things, of course, repeat year after year, like the need to remember those who have passed away. It was a nice In Memoriam segment (it used watercolor-style portraits rather than clips, but the clips are always so short that they hardly seem worth it, and many backstage folks don't get them anyway), mostly avoiding the weird "putting everyone in ascending order of fame" game. It mixed people like Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams in among sound designers and casting directors, which makes it feel less like a contest to see who's last. (That said: writer and director Mike Nichols.) And then Jennifer Hudson sang a song with a terrible sound mix that probably could have been omitted.

It also seems there must always be one utterly unnecessary bit that comes when everyone is exhausted, and this year, it was a 50th anniversary tribute that came almost three hours into the show, featuring Lady Gaga singing not one but several songs from it. While it was a cute idea and a neat chance to see an artist do something different, by then it was obvious that the show was running wildly long, and spending long minutes on a 50-year-old movie with one of the most familiar scores on earth was the kind of thing that makes people mutiny. (But it did end in the undeniably delightful experience of hearing Julie Andrews say, "My dear Lady Gaga." That, as they say, is something.) Andrews presented Best Original Score to Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

But the late sprint was for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman. It won for best original screenplay for Inarritu himself and his collaborators Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. and Armando Bo.

Best adapted screenplay went to Graham Moore for The Imitation Game (a film that was "adapted" from a book about Alan Turing, and quite liberally adapted from reality).

The awards for best actor and best actress went where many expected: to Eddie Redmayne for The Theory Of Everything and to Julianne Moore for Still Alice.

And then, the big moment: Birdman was named best picture. Presenter Sean Penn closed the night with one more unfortunate joke about who gave Inarritu his green card (a joke that you might get away with if it weren't such a wretched year for diversity in both nominees and films), and it was time to go to bed.

The ceremony, on the whole, gave some welcome recognition to some grateful creators and actors — Simmons, Arquette and Moore are all people who have been around acting for a while, certainly, and others like Alexandre Desplat are perhaps less familiar names but people whose success is hard not to salute. Eddie Redmayne is a nifty young actor who obviously worked very hard to play Stephen Hawking, a role that has to have been incredibly physically demanding, among other things. (It's hard not to be thrilled that he also just gave an entirely bonkers performance in the Wachowskis' space adventure Jupiter Ascending, so he's not limiting himself to chilly prestige pictures.)

At the same time, it's a ceremony that feels more and more limited in its outlook rather than less and less. At a time when creative people are making exploratory stuff on the cheap, in new formats and with new distribution methods, the Oscars remain the same, offering best picture nominations to eight films, not one of which is about something other than the life of a man or a couple of men. Birdman is an offbeat film in many ways and has real visual inventiveness, but it also has hugely familiar themes: the lone struggling genius misunderstood by the world, yelling at his daughter about social media and defending the importance of real art.

There are other stories, and there are other voices. The ceremony was dotted with people of color as presenters, performers and participants in comedy bits — Ejiofor, Oyelowo, Hudson, Zoe Saldana, Octavia Spencer, Lupita Nyong'o, even Eddie Murphy, among others. But it doesn't change who was up there being honored or even nominated, aside from Inarritu — the second consecutive Latino director to win after Alfonso Cuaron last year — who joked that perhaps next year, there would be restrictions to prevent more wins by "two Mexicans in a row." It's certainly not only the lack of diversity that makes the Oscars seem irrelevant to the point of quaintness, but it's not helping.

It may be that this is just a broken model. Perhaps it's time to look back at successful Emmy and Tony ceremonies that Harris has hosted and admit that if he struggles this much, either this is a crowd that's simply so puffed-up and joyless about this whole thing that there's no point in bringing in anyone who's any fun, or it's a show so inherently uninteresting that only the speeches need to even exist. Because it's either that or go back to Billy Crystal, and eventually there has to be a plan B that isn't that.

How about this next year: no host at all, just presenters and speeches. No musical numbers, no montages (except, I suppose, In Memoriam). Because maybe if this guy can't make this format work, maybe people should stop taking this job.

The Turkish army launched an overnight operation to rescue some 40 of its soldiers guarding an Ottoman-era tomb who came under attack by self-declared Islamic State. The remains of the Tomb of Suleyman Shah were taken back across the border.

NPR's Peter Kenyon, reporting from Geneva, says that throughout the conflict in Syria, Turkey has kept soldiers at the tomb near Aleppo. Suleyman Shah was the grandfather of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled vast parts of Europe, Asia and Africa for six centuries. Shah is revered by Turks.

"We had given the Turkish armed forces a directive to protect our spiritual values and the safety of our armed forces personnel," Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in televised remarks.

The New York Times writes: "The operation, called "Sah Firat," began on Saturday and involved a large convoy of tanks and other heavy weaponry that entered Syria through Kobani, the Kurdish territory in Syria that has recently been freed of Islamic State militants in an American-led military operation, according to the Turkish newspapers Milliyet and Yeni Safak. The reports were pulled from the Internet almost immediately after being posted."

The operation involved some 600 Turkish troops and 100 tanks and armored personnel carriers backed by surveillance flights by manned aircraft and drones.

By way of background, The Associated Press notes:

"Turkey was widely criticized for not intervening for months in the Kobani battle, which finally saw Kurdish fighters backed by U.S.-led airstrikes push out the extremists.

"There had been rumors for months that the soldiers stationed at the tomb had been besieged by militants from the Islamic State group, which hold a third of Syria and neighboring Iraq in their self-declared caliphate. Some 40 Turkish soldiers once guarded the tomb, making them a target for the Islamic State group and other militants in Syria's long-running civil war, though the overnight operation apparently saw no fighting."

Islamic State

Turkey

Syria

Blog Archive