1
Opinion
The Impending Deluge
Rising sea levels in a warming world threaten us with ever more sudden cataclysms.
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Opinion
House of Death
In all of my years of practicing medicine, I had never been inside an inpatient hospice.
3
Opinion
Is Force-Feeding Torture?
President Obama could put an end to the practice in Guantánamo Bay with a phone call. Why won’t he?
4
Health
Weight Loss May Ease Psoriasis
Losing weight may help to allay the red, scaly skin patches of psoriasis, a new study shows.
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World
Concern Grows as Group Disappears in Mexico
Eleven young people — seven men and four women — never made it home after a night out in the trendy Zona Rosa neighborhood of the capital.
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U.S.
Surpluses Help, but Fiscal Woes for States Go On
Many states are expecting surpluses this year, and while they are welcome, the surpluses are not as robust as they appear because states put off costs during the economic downturn.
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Your Money
Fired for Being Gay? Protections Are Piecemeal
Workplace protections for L.G.B.T. people amount to a patchwork of state and local laws and judicial decisions.
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Opinion
An Elizabethan Cyberwar
In confronting today’s cyberbattles, the United States should think less about Soviets and more about pirates.
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N.Y. / Region
Jury Convicts Officer Over False Claim of Drug Deal
Isaias Alicea was convicted of 10 felony counts of filing a false document, after claiming he saw two men conducting a drug deal in West Harlem last year.
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N.Y. / Region
Amid Protests Over Free Tuition, Mayor Urges Graduates to Donate
Speaking at Cooper Union’s commencement ceremony on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged the new alumni to give back to their school.
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World
Grim Task of Identifying Factories’ Dead Overwhelms Bangladeshi Lab
Anger over the Rana Plaza collapse has intensified the pressure on a small lab struggling to make DNA matches with the remains of about 300 unidentified victims.
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Technology
Why Big Data Is Not Truth
Don’t let the rhetoric fool you, a Microsoft researcher says: Big Data is a human tool, which means it is subject to all kinds of miscollection, misapplication and abuse. While it is being promoted as a kind of data-driven truth, it is not and it poses a threat to privacy.
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Technology
Roam the World and Keep the Cellphone on a Budget
After years of criticism, American mobile carriers now offer overseas calling packages at a small fraction of what they once cost.
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Business Day
China's Pork Deal May Hinge on the Risk for an Uproar
A Chinese producer’s $4.7 billion deal for Smithfield is subject to a national security review, which is no picnic given American anxiety about China.
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World
Germany Counts Heads and Finds 1.5 Million Fewer Residents Than It Expected
Already deeply concerned about its rapidly dwindling population, Germany found 1.5 million fewer inhabitants than previously assumed.
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Opinion
Belief Is the Least Part of Faith
It is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.
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U.S.
Scramble for Female Votes in Mass. Senate Race
Representative Edward Market is aggressively courting women voters with the help of Carole King and others as he tries to tip the balance in the Massachusetts Senate race in his favor.
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Real Estate
Transactions
Notable properties that have been recently listed for sale, sold or leased.
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Opinion
Attacks on Muslims in Myanmar
The government must speak and act against extremist violence if Myanmar wants to realize its democratic aspirations.
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Magazine
Can I Use the Same Paper for Multiple College Courses?
Self-plagiarism, grounds for expulsion, an exercise in intellectual complexity or all of the above?
2
Sunday Review
When It May Not Pay to Be Famous
For legal standards, there’s a vast gray area between First Amendment protection and an individual’s right of publicity.
3
Books
Gardening
“The Flower of Empire,” Tatiana Holway’s lively case for the importance of the Amazonian water lily, is one of the season’s crop of gardening books.
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Opinion
House of Death
In all of my years of practicing medicine, I had never been inside an inpatient hospice.
"‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’"
5
Opinion
No Replacement for Corporate Taxes
Corporate income taxes need to be reformed, not abolished.
6
Opinion
A Failure to Police Chemical Plants
The poor and minorities remain vulnerable to accidents involving toxic materials. Therefore, the E.P.A. should strengthen regulations.
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Your Money
When Interest Rates Rise, Stocks Don’t Have to Fall
The stock market has done well even as interest rates have recently climbed — a challenge to a popular notion.
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Business Day
Breadwinning Wives and Nervous Husbands
A study reveals that women’s growing financial success may be contributing to a decline in marriage stability. And one reason may be a lingering attitude from the “Mad Men” days.
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Opinion
The Triumph of the Working Mother
Those who stay at home report more sadness, anger and depression.
10
Opinion
She’s Getting Her Boots Dirty
One of the 1 percent puts herself in the middle of those on the other end of the ladder.
11
Magazine
Dwight Gooden Was Not Best Friends With Darryl Strawberry
The former Mets pitcher on real friendships and surviving “Celebrity Rehab.”
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N.Y. / Region
Owner Makes All-Out Push for Indian Point
Entergy, the company that owns the Indian Point nuclear power plant, has spent millions of dollars on lobbying to make its case across the state: Keep it open.
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U.S.
Rev. Dr. Roger L. Shinn, Linked Faith to Social Causes, Dies at 96
Dr. Shinn championed the ecumenical movement and argued for a sharper sense of ethical and social responsibility on the part of moderate Protestant churches.
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Business Day
This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.
Dmitry Itskov wants us all to live forever, our minds inside avatars. And he is spending a bundle to try to make his colossal dream happen.
15
Opinion
The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
“The New Digital Age” proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not.
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Education
With Students as Backdrop, Obama Warns of Doubling of Loan Rates
President Obama’s remarks in the Rose Garden came as Democrats and Republicans differ on how to stop the rate for federally subsidized student loans from rising on July 1.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/krugman-the-geezers-are-all-right.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
"Last month the Congressional Budget Office released its much-anticipated projections
for debt and deficits, and there were cries of lamentation from the
deficit scolds who have had so much influence on our policy discourse.
The problem, you see, was that the budget office numbers looked, well,
O.K.: deficits are falling fast, and the ratio of debt to gross domestic
product is projected to remain roughly stable over the next decade.
Obviously it would be nice, eventually, to actually reduce debt. But if
you’ve built your career around proclamations of imminent fiscal doom,
this definitely wasn’t the report you wanted to see. Still, we can always count on the baby boomers to deliver disaster,
can’t we? Doesn’t the rising tide of retirees mean that Social Security
and Medicare are doomed unless we radically change those programs now
now now?
Maybe not.
To be fair, the reports of the Social Security and Medicare trustees
released Friday do suggest that America’s retirement system needs some
significant work. The ratio of Americans over 65 to those of working age
will rise inexorably over the decades ahead, and this will translate
into rising spending on Social Security and Medicare as a share of
national income.
But the numbers aren’t nearly as overwhelming as you might have
imagined, given the usual rhetoric. And if you look under the hood, the
data suggest that we can, if we choose, maintain social insurance as we
know it with only modest adjustments.
Start with Social Security. The retirement program’s trustees do foresee
rising spending as the population ages, with total payments rising from
5.1 percent of G.D.P. now to 6.2 percent in 2035, at which point they
stabilize. This means, by the way, that all the talk of Social Security
going “bankrupt” is nonsense; even if nothing at all is done, the system
will be able to pay most of its scheduled benefits as far as the eye
can see.
Still, it does look as if there will eventually be a shortfall, and the
usual suspects insist that we must move right now to reduce scheduled
benefits. But I’ve never understood the logic of this demand. The risk
is that we might, at some point in the future, have to cut benefits; to
avoid this risk of future benefit cuts, we are supposed to act
preemptively by...cutting future benefits. What problem, exactly, are we
solving here?
What about Medicare? For years, many people — myself included — have
warned that Medicare is a much bigger problem than Social Security, and
the latest report
from the program’s trustees still shows spending rising from 3.6
percent of G.D.P. now to 5.6 percent in 2035. But that’s a smaller rise
than in previous projections. Why?
The answer is that the long-term upward trend in health care costs — a
trend that has affected private insurance as well as Medicare — seems to
have flattened out significantly over the past few years. Nobody is
quite sure why, but there are indications that some of the cost-reducing
measures contained in the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare, are
actually starting to “bend the curve,”
just as they were supposed to. And because there are a number of
cost-reducing measures in the law that have not yet kicked in, there’s
every reason to believe that this favorable trend will continue.
Furthermore, there’s plenty of room for more savings, if only because recent research confirms that Americans pay far more
for health procedures than citizens of other advanced countries pay;
that the price premium can and should be brought down, and when it is,
Medicare’s financial outlook will improve further.
So what are we looking at here? The latest projections show the combined
cost of Social Security and Medicare rising by a bit more than 3
percent of G.D.P. between now and 2035, and that number could easily
come down with more effort on the health care front. Now, 3 percent of
G.D.P. is a big number, but it’s not an economy-crushing number. The
United States could, for example, close that gap entirely through tax
increases, with no reduction in benefits at all, and still have one of
the lowest overall tax rates in the advanced world.
But haven’t all the great and the good been telling us that Social
Security and Medicare as we know them are unsustainable, that they must
be totally revamped — and made much less generous? Why yes, they have;
they’ve also been telling us that we must slash spending right away or
we’ll face a Greek-style fiscal crisis. They were wrong about that, and
they’re wrong about the longer run, too.
The truth is that the long-term outlook for Social Security and
Medicare, while not great, actually isn’t all that bad. It’s time to
stop obsessing about how we’ll pay benefits to retirees in 2035 and
focus instead on how we’re going to provide jobs to unemployed Americans
in the here and now."
17
Opinion
Costa Rican Turtle Defender Found Slain on the Beach He Patrolled
A young Costa Rican conservationist is slain after warning about ties between sea turtle poaching and drug trafficking.
18
Real Estate
No Toys, but a Park Nearby
Once part of the International Toy Center, the building at 1107 Broadway is being converted to 125 condos, most of which will be three-bedrooms.
19
Opinion
An Opening to Strengthen Chemical Regulations
A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate deserves to be passed because it would be a significant advance over the current Toxic Substances Control Act.
20
Booming
Why Am I at a National Park?
Baby boomers are a critical constituency for the national parks, but they are also a graying one.
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5
Style
Why a Widowed Mom Sends Her Son to Camp All Summer
I’m the widowed mother of one, and there’s no one in the world who would fault me for keeping him close. Except me.
6
N.Y. / Region
Owner Makes All-Out Push for Indian Point
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Magazine
C.E.O.’s Don’t Need to Earn Less. They Need to Sweat More.
What George Costanza and artful ineptitude can teach us about executive pay.
15
Opinion
Health Care Innovation
A Health and Human Services Department official discusses ways to improve our medical system.
16
Business Day
British Columbia Opposes Planned Oil Sands Pipeline
Environmental groups said that British Columbia, which has been concerned about spills, has probably doomed the pipeline.
17
Job Market
Building Companies to Last
The founder of Arrowsight, a video monitoring and motion-sensor company, says he learned as a child the importance of building durable products and services.
18
U.S.
Report Shows Better Outlook for Medicare
A stronger economy and slower growth in health spending have helped strengthen the financial outlook for the federal insurance program, the Obama administration said.
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Opinion
Attacks on Muslims in Myanmar
The government must speak and act against extremist violence if Myanmar wants to realize its democratic aspirations.
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