Eight Reasons to Dislike the Obama Administration's Trade Agenda

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The Cato Institute is a reliable defender of free trade. But even that libertarian think tank is suspicious of one of the Obama administrations main priorities in free-trade negotiations in the Atlantic and Pacific basins.

Dan Ikenson, director of Catos Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, argues that the Obama administration should give up on trying to include a procedure that allows companies to force governments into binding arbitration when they feel that their interests have been harmed. We examined this procedure, technically known as investor-state dispute settlement, in a Bloomberg Businessweek article last month. In one egregious case,Philip Morris (PM) has brought an arbitration case in Hong Kong challenging Australias plain-packaging law for cigarettes. The tobacco company says the law prevents it from marketing its brand in violation of a treaty between Australia and Hong Kong. Heres the key paragraph from Ikensons article:

As is true of most populist causes, buried beneath the enabling mythology and hyperbole are some kernels of truth. One such truth, which this paper seeks to distill from the vacuous, anti-capitalist hyperventilation surrounding the trade agenda, is that the so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which enables foreign investors to sue host governments in third-party arbitration tribunals for treatment that allegedly fails to meet certain standards and that results in a loss of asset values, is an unnecessary, unreasonable, and unwise provision to include in trade agreements. Although detractors may not know it by name, ISDS is a significant reason why trade agreements engender so much antipathy. Yet, ISDS is not even essential to the task of freeing trade. So why burden the effort by carrying needless baggage?

The U.S. Trade Representatives office argues that the accusations against the dispute resolution mechanism are unfair.

Boiled down, here are Ikensons eight reasons for believing Obama should back down and leave the investor-state dispute resolution mechanism out of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership:

1. Its overkill. Governments will generally do the right thing to preserve their reputations as friendly places for investment.

2. Countries that give in and agree to arbitration may become less willing to compromise on such other issues as market access.

3. It could encourage outsourcing by making other countries as safe for investment as the U.S. is.

4. It gives foreign companies operating in the U.S. an advantage over domestic companies: They can bring cases via trade arbitration, which domestic players cant do.

5. U.S. laws and regulations will be exposed to arbitration challenges with increasing frequency.

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Eight Reasons to Dislike the Obama Administration's Trade Agenda

Neanderthals Lived in Small, Isolated Populations, Gene Analysis Shows

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Modern humanity's ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, lived in small groups that were isolated from one another, suggests an investigation into their DNA. The analysis also finds that Neanderthals lacked some human genes that are linked to our behavior. (Related: "Why Am I Neanderthal?")

In recent years, experts in ancient DNA have mapped out the genes of Neanderthals, a species of human that vanished some 30,000 years ago. These gene maps have revealed that many modern people share a small part of their ancestry, and a small percentage of their genes, with those early humans.

Now moving beyond ancestry, researchers are comparing these ancient gene maps to those of modern humans. The comparisons may point to genes that make us uniquely human and uncover links to the origins of genetic ailments.

Compared to Neanderthals, humanity appears to have evolved more when it comes to genes related to behavior, suggests a team headed by Svante Pbo, a pioneer in ancient genetics at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Their study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They note in particular that genes linked to hyperactivity and aggressive behavior in modern humans appear to be absent in Neanderthals. Also missing is DNA associated with syndromes such as autism.

"The paper describes some very interesting evolutionary dynamics," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The Neanderthal genes suggest that sometime after one million to 500,000 years ago, Neanderthal numbers decreased and the population stayed small, Pbo's group determined. A small population size would have been bad news for Neanderthals, Hawks said, because it would have meant that "natural selection had less power to weed out bad mutations."

Ancient Answers

Pbo and colleagues looked at the genes of two ancient Neanderthals, one from Spain and one from Croatia. They compared the DNA of those individuals to that of a third Neanderthal who had lived in Siberia and whose DNA had been analyzed in an earlier study, and to the DNA of several modern humans.

"We find that [Neanderthals] had even less [genetic] variation than present-day humans," Pbo said by email. Genetic diversity among Neanderthals was about one-fourth as much as is seen among modern Africans, he said, and one-third that of modern Europeans or Asians.

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Neanderthals Lived in Small, Isolated Populations, Gene Analysis Shows

Video Conferencing Delivers Education and Mental Health Care to the Arctic Circle – Video

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Video Conferencing Delivers Education and Mental Health Care to the Arctic Circle
This post was written by Willa Black, Director of Corporate Affairs for Cisco Canada, and was originally published on the Huffington Post. The territory of N...

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Video Conferencing Delivers Education and Mental Health Care to the Arctic Circle - Video

Health care act only chips away at goal

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Published: Tue, April 22, 2014 @ 12:00 a.m.

Health care act only chips away at goal

SACRAMENTO, Calif.

Swan Lockett had high hopes that President Barack Obamas health overhaul would lead her family to an affordable insurance plan, but that hasnt happened.

Instead, because lawmakers in her state refused to expand Medicaid, the 46-year-old mother of four from Texas uses home remedies or pays $75 to see a doctor when she has an asthma attack.

If I dont have the money, I just let it go on its own, Lockett said.

The federal health care overhaul has provided coverage for millions of Americans, but it has only chipped away at one of its core goals: to sharply reduce the number of people without insurance.

President Barack Obama announced last week that 8 million people have signed up for coverage through new insurance exchanges, but barriers persist blocking tens of millions of people around the nation from accessing health care.

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Health care act only chips away at goal