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The history of science is, like so much else, a human history. But history tends to get simplified; a map becomes a single road leading from point to point. It's not surprising that some scientists who contributed invaluably to the field have been kept out of the dominant narrative because they were women. But in the last days of the 19th century and the early days of the 20th, Henrietta Swan Leavitt - one of the many woman "computers" at the Harvard Observatory - used the measurements of variable stars to determine fixed distances across space. And fifty years later, Katherine Johnson - a black woman working at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia when the state was still deeply segregated - would map John Glenn's space flight, and America's trip to the moon. Women are indelible contributors to the field, and two of this year's best histories - Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, and Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe - are out to prove it. There's deep value to these stories in the here and now. Women fought prejudice (twice over, in the case of Hidden Figures) and did crucial work that shaped our understanding and exploration of the universe. From a glass-plate storage room in the Observatory, Williamina Fleming could look at a far-off star and map it in a sea of numbers; in a segregated Virginia, Katherine Johnson could look at a sea of numbers and map out a path to the Moon. Taken together, these books make a case not just for acknowledging women's contributions to the field, but for the value of science itself.
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For nearly two decades, the Bureau of Prisons has contracted with a handful of private companies to incarcerate thousands of non-U.S. citizens. Held in a dozen so-called criminal alien requirement prisons ... the inmates in private custody are, for the most part, locked up for immigration offenses or drug violations. CAR facilities have ... a track record of abuse and neglect. In August, it seemed that years of pressure [from advocacy organizations] had finally paid off, when the Justice Department announced it would begin phasing out private prisons. Under the DOJ directive, the facilities ... would see their contracts reduced or allowed to expire without renewal and the inmates in their custody transferred. Within hours of the announcement, the stocks of industry heavyweights Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group plummeted more than 35 percent. The momentum was short-lived. On November 9, as it became clear that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in the race for the presidency, Fortune declared private prisons the biggest (stock market) winner in Trumps victory, noting a 49 percent surge in CCA stock. In the weeks that followed, Trump would tap Jeff Sessions as his choice for attorney general. Not only could Sessions ... undo the DOJs directive, but the plans promoted by Trump and his advisers threaten to drastically increase the number of people held by companies that have repeatedly demonstrated the conflict of profit motive when it comes to depriving people of physical liberty.
Note: Read the complete article above for a detailed account of the substandard conditions at a CCA facility which led to inmate and corrections officer deaths. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing prison system corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
A wide-ranging investigation into generic drug prices took its most significant turn yet on Thursday, as state attorneys general accused two industry leaders, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Mylan, and four smaller companies of engaging in brazen price-fixing schemes - and promised that more charges were coming. A civil complaint filed by 20 states accuses the companies of conspiring to artificially inflate prices on an antibiotic and a diabetes drug, with executives coordinating through informal industry gatherings and personal calls and text messages. Officials said the case was a small example of broader problems in the drug business. We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, George C. Jepsen, Connecticuts attorney general, whose office started the inquiry that led to the charges, said. I stress that our investigation is continuing, and it goes way beyond the two drugs in this lawsuit, and it involves many more companies than are in this lawsuit. The complaint on Thursday describes a cozy industry culture defined by regular dinners and social outings, and argues that those events often cross the line to violate antitrust rules. Generic drug makers hoping to begin selling a new drug first seek out rivals, the suit says, in hopes of reaching an agreement on how to maintain market share and avoid competing on price. These agreements had the effect of artificially maintaining high prices for a large number of generic drugs and creating an appearance of competition when in fact none existed, the lawsuit says.
Note: A separate anti-trust investigation into Mylan was recently launched in New York over price-fixing on public school EpiPen contracts. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
San Franciscos Wells Fargo set up an incentivized system of rewards and punishments for its staff at every level that led to the creation of phony accounts and illicit fees being charged to millions of customers. Yet Wells Fargo ... refused to appear before my state Senate committee last month and has sidestepped federal regulators and inquiries. The last company to conduct itself in such a way before a California legislative committee was Enron. These criminal activities affected up to 2 million accounts - nearly 900,000 in California alone. The financial cost to consumers was in the millions of dollars, and the loss in trust is untold. Wells Fargo knew it had a problem - firing more than 1,000 employees a year for five years is testament to that. Yet, it took no effective steps to stop the fraud. These werent just low-level employees. After my staff pressed them, Wells now says that of the 5,300 staff fired for unethical sales practices, 480 were bank branch managers or higher. An untold number of managers continue to work at the bank despite the fact that they engaged in fraudulent behavior. Wells Fargo has begun to make amends by entering into a settlement agreement with local and federal regulators, paying $185 million in fines. It also has retained an outside accounting firm to audit accounts to identify and fully reimburse every customer for any fees associated with an unauthorized account. Wells Fargo must come clean on how pervasive this scheme was.
Note: The above was written by Steve Glazer, chairman of the California Senate Banking and Financial Institutions Committee. Read more about the massive fraud perpetrated by Wells Fargo. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing banking corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
A transformation is happening in global energy markets thats worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity. This has happened in isolated projects in the past. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon. Solar investment has gone from nothing ... five years ago to quite a lot, said Ethan Zindler, head of U.S. policy analysis at BNEF. A huge part of this story is China, which has been rapidly deploying solar and helping other countries finance their own projects. The world recently passed a turning point and is adding more capacity for clean energy each year than for coal and natural gas combined. Peak fossil-fuel use for electricity may be reached within the next decade. Thursdays BNEF report, called Climatescope, ranks and profiles emerging markets for their ability to attract capital for low-carbon energy projects. The top-scoring markets were China, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, and India. For populations still relying on expensive kerosene generators, or who have no electricity at all, and for those living in the dangerous smog of thickly populated cities, the shift to renewables and increasingly to solar cant come soon enough.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
The U.S. agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards was itself penetrated by a hacker after the November elections, according to a security firm working with law enforcement on the matter. The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Posing as a potential buyer, the researchers ... discovered that the Russian-speaking hacker had obtained the credentials of more than 100 people at the election commission after exploiting a common database vulnerability. The hacker was trying to sell information about the vulnerability to a Middle Eastern government for several thousand dollars. The election commission certifies voting systems and develops standards for technical guidelines and best practices for election officials across the country. The researchers said the hacker had an unusual business model, scanning for ways to break into all manner of businesses and other entities and then moving rapidly to sell that access. We dont think he actually works for any government or is super sophisticated, Barysevich said. In the case of the election commission, the hacker used methods including an SQL injection, a well known and preventable flaw, obtaining a list of user names and obfuscated passwords, which he was then able to crack.
Note: The security firm Recorded Future was launched by the investment arms of the CIA and Google. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing elections corruption news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Elections Information Center.
The latest batch of President-elect Donald Trumps Cabinet nominees are poised to reshape not only the nation, but also the planet. The man tapped to be Americas chief diplomat is a trusted friend of Russia, the nations longtime geopolitical rival. The man tapped to lead the Department of Energy has long pledged to kill it. Russia [awarded him] its Order of Friendship in 2013, one of the highest awards Moscow gives foreigners. The man nominated to shepherd the Labor Department opposes raising the minimum wage. And Trumps nominees to run the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Interior and Energy are dubious about the science behind climate change. Trump tapped these men most of his nominees are wealthy, white men because they are top deal-makers. And while they may not be creatures of Washington, they are still part of the nations elite and a far cry from Trumps campaign promise to drain the swamp of entrenched power-brokers. Its a cabinet of tycoons, said Eleni Kounalakis, a San Francisco business executive who served as U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 2010 to 2013. He believes business tycoons know whats best. Like whats best for Exxon is best for America.
The watchdog wing of Congress has quietly launched an investigation into the integrity of the Pentagons whistleblower protection program. The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the investigative arm of Congress, has been looking into the extent to which Department of Defense whistleblower policies ... reassure employees of their rights to raise concerns without fear of reprisal. The investigation will also likely target senior Pentagon officials accused of destroying evidence that would have exculpated former senior NSA official Thomas Drake, who raised internal complaints about what he believed to be NSA misconduct and waste before ultimately approaching journalists. Rather than having his concerns acknowledged, Drake spent months fighting charges against him under the Espionage Act. His career in the intelligence community was ended. Bureaucratic abuses of power are the primary reason otherwise circumspect national security whistleblowers leak to the media. It is too dangerous to work within an untrustworthy system, Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, wrote in a statement. John Crane, formerly the assistant inspector general in the Pentagon, revealed his role in attempting to protect Drakes identity and investigate the document destruction involved in his case last May - an effort he claims cost him his job. The implications of the investigation may eventually be important for evaluating the actions of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Note: Mass surveillance whistleblower Thomas Drake attempted to work within the system and was was targeted for prosecution. John Crane was forced out of the Pentagon in 2013. His story is told in a new book, titled, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing In The Age of Snowden by Mark Hertsgaard. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
If you follow the news regularly - even if the stories you see are factual - youre likely to overestimate the amount of violence in the world, underrate the performance of the government, and develop an unduly low opinion of the average American. For every problem you see reported in the news, there are almost always people responding - and some are doing pretty smart things. One encouraging pattern visible across the country is a gradual shift from reflexive punishment, which is usually counterproductive ... to harm reduction and treatment. This theme is explored in Chasing Heroin, a two-hour PBS Frontline documentary ... which illuminates the countrys heroin crisis. The film explains the public policies that shaped the crisis and reports on some alternatives to punishment, including drug courts, and a promising initiative in Seattle, Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, which ... has been shown to markedly reduce criminality among addicts. The shift away from punishment can also be seen in schools, as they reduce the use of suspensions as the go-to discipline option, and turn to restorative justice practices, which have been shown to improve school cultures and improve graduation rates. The shift from punishment to treatment is supported by emerging insights from psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics. The Crisis Within, a four-part series ... explain how such toxic stress harms children, and explore ways that parents, educators and others can protect them.
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In late 2014, Senate Democrats delivered to a handful of federal agencies copies of a 6,700-page classified report about the secret prison network the Central Intelligence Agency established after the Sept. 11 attacks. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who oversaw the report, hoped it would become a seminal document for national security professionals for generations to come. Now the report ... is at risk of remaining under wraps for more than a decade. At the Justice Departments direction, officials at the C.I.A., State Department, Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence placed their copies in safes, unread. In January 2015, Senator Richard Burr, the new chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence ... wrote to President Obama demanding that all copies be returned to the Senate. He also instructed the administration not to enter the report into the executive branchs system of records, since doing so would ... mean that the report could at some point see the light of day. On Friday, the White House informed Ms. Feinstein that it intended to preserve the report under the Presidential Records Act. That step bars the incoming administration from destroying all copies of the report. But President Obama did not ... declassify the study, which means that the report would remain secret for at least 12 years. We cant erase our mistakes by destroying the history books, said Ms. Feinstein, who released a partly redacted summary of the report in December 2014.
Note: For more along these lines, see the "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture". For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.
The superbug crisis is killing more patients than breast cancer as the Government is relying on flawed figures. The Department of Health estimates that 5,000 people die each year due to drug resistance, but Dr Ron Daniels, chief executive of the UK Sepsis Trust, claims the true figure is around 12,000. The number of deaths is rising each year as more bugs that lead to blood poisoning are becoming resistant to antibiotics. The full extent of the problem is obscured because the Government statistics are calculated using ballpark figures from foreign studies, not those conducted in the UK. Antimicrobial resistance is considered to be one of the worlds most serious and growing long-term threats to health, which it has been warned could eventually lead to everyday cuts and infections becoming fatal. Yet superbugs are rarely listed on death certificates. The UK Sepsis Trust is calling for an official register of superbug deaths in order that the rising count is reflected in Government policy. Figures provided to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism by Dr Daniels suggest the number of people dying from sepsis, triggered by antibiotic resistant bacteria, is more than double the official figure. This would put superbugs ahead of breast cancer, which is widely thought of as one of the UKs biggest killers, despite the number of deaths falling to 11,433 in 2014.
Note: There is strong evidence to suggest that feeding antibiotics to livestock leads to superbugs in humans. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing health news articles from reliable major media sources.
US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia interfered in last months presidential election. Officials ... were told that intelligence agencies had found that individuals linked to the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of confidential emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and others. The emails were steadily leaked via WikiLeaks ... revealing that DNC figures had colluded to harm the chances of [Clintons] nomination rival Bernie Sanders, and later giving examples of collusion between her campaign and figures in the media to blindside Trump in debates. The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A ... senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was directing the hackers. Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, [said of] the CIA claims: They are absolutely making it up ... I know who leaked them. They are certainly not Russian and its an insider. Its a leak, not a hack; the two are different things. If ... the CIAs statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone. America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and its not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.
Note: The Guardian newspaper's website removed all front page links to the above article just three hours after it was published. In its place, the Guardian ran a new article that was entirely supportive of what Wikileaks affiliate Craig Murray calls "the CIAs blatant lie" about the leaked DNC emails. A short essay by WantToKnow.info team member Mark Bailey explores this apparent media manipulation.
There are now 83 potential suspects and 98 teams involved in the inquiry into historic child sexual abuse in English football, the National Police Chiefs' Council revealed. The investigation involves all levels of football, from top-level clubs to amateur teams. Police forces across the UK continue to receive calls from victims and people offering information. In total, 639 referrals have been received from both the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) helpline and police forces. Of the victims identified so far, 98% are male and their ages range from seven to 20. "Allegations received by police forces across the country are being swiftly acted upon," said Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the NPCC's lead for Child Protection. The investigation began when former professional footballer Andy Woodward became the first to publicly tell his story in November. Fellow lower-league player Steve Walters and ex-England internationals Paul Stewart and David White also came forward soon after, before a hotline was set up for people who were sexually abused while playing football in Britain.
Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.
The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter. Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others. It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russias goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected, said a senior U.S. official. Thats the consensus view. The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week. The CIA presentation ... fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agencys assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered. For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin directing the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. Some key ... lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement. Ill be the first one to come out and point at Russia if theres clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence - even now, said [chairman of the House Intelligence Committee] Devin Nunes.
Note: The above article comes on the heels of the Washington Post's promotion of an anti-Russian "McCarthyite blacklist" which smeared dozens of U.S. news sites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on elections corruption and the manipulation of public perception.
Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a tireless opponent of Soviet leaders and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is not a man easily put off his stride. But he got knocked sideways when British police officers banged on the front door of his home ... and informed him that they had received information about forbidden images in his possession. He faced five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image. After Mr. Bukovsky, 73, entered a not-guilty plea, [the case] was delayed [following] a prosecution request for more time to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovskys computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there. Mr. Bukovsky ... insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material. Old-style kompromat featured ... a wide range of other primitive entrapment techniques. Today, however, kompromat has become allied with the more sophisticated tricks of cybermischief-making. Hacking is not only a good way to get real information ... but a relatively easy and usually untraceable way to plant fake information. This blurring of all boundaries between truth and falsehood in the service of operational needs has created a climate in Russia in which even the most serious and grotesque accusations ... are simply a currency for settling scores.
Note: Hackers from any country's intelligence services could plant child porn on anyone's computer so that they would then be arrested and convicted. What a wild world we live in! For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
In a few days, the water-bound wind turbines off of Rhode Islands Block Island are expected to generate electricity commercially for the first time, and New Englanders are set to become the first in U.S. history to use electric power generated from an offshore wind turbine. The Block Island Wind Project is the first commercial offshore wind farm ever built in the U.S., and the start of its operation marks the the beginning of a brand new clean energy industry in the United States. Offshore wind is one of Americas largest untapped energy sources. As part of its strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to prevent global warming from exceeding 2C (3.6F), the Obama administration unveiled a plan in September to build wind farms off of nearly every U.S. coastline by 2050 - enough turbines to generate zero-carbon electricity for more than 23 million homes. In 2009, the Obama administration began ... leasing large swaths of the East Coasts continental shelf to offshore wind developers. Since then, federal government lease sales have been held for areas off the coasts of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware. New York is next in line for a lease sale this month. Once it is operational, the success of the Block Island Wind Project will prove that offshore wind power can be done in the U.S., said Steve Pike, CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a publicly funded state agency that conducts offshore wind technology research.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
A research team at the University of Bristol has developed a way to use a type of nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery that is an actual diamond. Such a battery produces very low power, but has no moving parts, no emissions of any type including radiation, needs no maintenance, does not need to be recharged and will operate for thousands of years. The team grew a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radiation field, was able to generate a small electrical current. And the radioactive field can be produced by the diamond itself by making the diamond from radioactive carbon-14 extracted from nuclear waste. Even better, the amount of radioactivity in each diamond battery is a lot less than in a single banana. Diamonds are made from pure carbon subjected to high pressures, usually deep in the Earths crust. But we have been artificially making them for decades. The normal way to produce electricity is to use energy, like burning coal or capturing wind, to move a magnet through a coil of wire to generate a current. However, a diamond is able to produce a charge simply by being subjected to a radiation field. The cost to produce a diamond is a lot less than disposing of used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste. These radioactive diamond batteries would have a very specific purpose low power and extremely long life. The ... battery would still be putting out 50% power after 5,730 years.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on nuclear power and new energy inventions.
"Whos this black guy trying to make friends with the Ku Klux Klan? A raised eyebrow, a shake of the head. Such were the sentiments of Scott Shepherd, a former Klan grand dragon, when he first saw Daryl Davis, a piano-playing bluesman who travels the nation attempting to dispel racism from those who hate him most. It doesnt often work, but over the decades Davis, like a man on a quixotic pilgrimage, has collected more than two dozen Klan robes from those who have disavowed white supremacy. His unlikely story unfolds in Accidental Courtesy, a documentary by Matt Ornstein that follows Davis on an odd and lively quest to Confederate monuments, Klansmen houses, boogie joints, churches and a hot dog stand. How can you hate me when you dont even know me? Davis asks in the film, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday. Throughout my life I have been looking for an answer to that. The son of a foreign service officer, Davis spent part of his childhood overseas, far from the racism many African Americans learn early. His first encounter with bigotry came when he was a 10-year-old Cub Scout. Bottles and rocks were thrown at him as he marched in a parade. The bewildering incident was the seed of a mission that years later found him ... starting a conversation with Klan Imperial Wizard Roger Kelly. The two became close. When Kelly quit the Klan, he gave Davis his robe. Talking to Klansmen has worked for me, said Davis. I dont seek to convert them but if they spend time with me, they cant hate me.
Note: Watch an awesome video about this brave black man who all but ended the KKK in Maryland by making friends with their leaders. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
FBI agents arrested former Insys Therapeutics CEO Michael Babich and five other former company executives on Thursday for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe an extremely addictive opioid painkiller to patients who didnt need it. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that the executives took part in a nationwide conspiracy to give healthcare providers kickbacks in exchange for the improper prescribing of Subsys - an opioid medication containing the highly addictive substance fentanyl, which is considered even more dangerous than painkillers like Vicodin. Subsys is meant to provide pain relief to cancer patients who are going through particularly excruciating pain episodes. Its reserved for these neediest of patients due to its potency and addictive qualities. But federal prosecutors allege that Babich and his co-conspirators doled out kickbacks to doctors who prescribed the drug even to non-cancer patients, and even set up a special reimbursement unit to sway insurance companies and pharmacy benefits managers to provide coverage for these non-authorized uses. The charges range from racketeering to conspiracy to mail and wire fraud. The FBIs actions come in the wake of a newly invigorated federal effort to tackle the prescription painkiller epidemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 165,000 Americans since 1999.
Note: These charges come on the heels of an ex-DEA official's public accusation that Congress has been helping drug makers avoid responsibility for their role in the US opioid epidemic. How many deaths and ruined lives are being caused by greedy executives and the politicians in their pockets? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011. We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse, says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Managements recycling association. Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. Thats a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they dont make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel, Ms Gripwell says. She describes Swedens policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. Theres a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden, Ms Gripwall says.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
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