Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)
Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.
And — not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.
Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.
Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.
The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually. (Although that includes diet sodas, it does not include noncarbonated sweetened beverages, which add up to at least 17 gallons a person per year.) Sweetened drinks could be taxed at 2 cents per ounce, so a six-pack of Pepsi would cost $1.44 more than it does now. An equivalent tax on fries might be 50 cents per serving; a quarter extra for a doughnut. (We have experts who can figure out how “bad” a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be; right now they’re busy calculating ethanol subsidies. Diet sodas would not be taxed.)
Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually. That money could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.
We could sell those staples cheap — let’s say for 50 cents a pound — and almost everywhere: drugstores, street corners, convenience stores, bodegas, supermarkets, liquor stores, even schools, libraries and other community centers.
This program would, of course, upset the processed food industry. Oh well. It would also bug those who might resent paying more for soda and chips and argue that their right to eat whatever they wanted was being breached. But public health is the role of the government, and our diet is right up there with any other public responsibility you can name, from water treatment to mass transit.
Some advocates for the poor say taxes like these are unfair because low-income people pay a higher percentage of their income for food and would find it more difficult to buy soda or junk. But since poor people suffer disproportionately from the cost of high-quality, fresh foods, subsidizing those foods would be particularly beneficial to them.
Right now it’s harder for many people to buy fruit than Froot Loops; chips and Coke are a common breakfast. And since the rate of diabetes continues to soar — one-third of all Americans either have diabetes or are pre-diabetic, most with Type 2 diabetes, the kind associated with bad eating habits — and because our health care bills are on the verge of becoming truly insurmountable, this is urgent for economic sanity as well as national health.
Justifying a Tax
At least 30 cities and states have considered taxes on soda or all sugar-sweetened beverages, and they’re a logical target: of the 278 additional calories Americans on average consumed per day between 1977 and 2001, more than 40 percent came from soda, “fruit” drinks, mixes like Kool-Aid and Crystal Light, and beverages like Red Bull, Gatorade and dubious offerings like Vitamin Water, which contains half as much sugar as Coke.
Some states already have taxes on soda — mostly low, ineffective sales taxes paid at the register. The current talk is of excise taxes, levied before purchase.

Police Say Oslo Suspect Admits ‘Facts’ in Massacre

OSLO — The Norwegian man charged the with attacks in and near Oslo that killed over 90 people has admitted “to the facts” of the case, the police and his lawyer said on Sunday, and says he acted alone in a strike eerily foretold in a detailed manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination.

Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

Women wept at a memorial service at Oslo Cathedral on Sunday for the victims of the attacks in and near Oslo

But “he is not admitting criminal guilt,” the acting police chief in Oslo, Sveinung Sponheim, told a news conference, and his claim to have acted alone contrasted with “some of the witness statements,” Reuters reported.
The attacks on Friday — a bombing in central Oslo closely followed by a bloody rampage against young people on nearby Utoya Island — was the deadliest attack in this Nordic nation since World War II, and it stunned many in a population of about five million who consider their country to be a haven of peace.
The police said on Sunday that the number of fatalities had risen to 93 from 92 with the death of one of the 97 people who had been reported as injured. Most of the bodies were found on Utoya Island, where young people from the governing Labor Party had gathered for an annual camp.
The police identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian. Acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.
Police divers were still searching the lake around Utoya Island for bodies, and said there were fears the death toll could rise again. “We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said Saturday. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”
Armed officers raided a location in eastern Oslo on Sunday and briefly detained several people before releasing them. Nothing had been found linking them to terrorism, the police said.
On Sunday, muted and shaken by the magnitude of the killings, many people gathered at the Lutheran cathedral here in Oslo to mourn. King Harald V and Queen Sonja, both dabbing tears, joined Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and other dignitaries for a service inside.
“We are crying with you; we feel for you,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. The two days since the killings “feels like an eternity — hours and days and nights filled with shock and angst and weeping,” he said.
“Each and every one of those who has left us is a tragedy,” he added. “Together, it is a national tragedy.”
A minister told mourners packed into the pews under the cathedral’s chandeliered ceiling that “hate cannot triumph over love.” Hundreds of others gathered on a rain-swept plaza outside, where they left carpets of flowers and candles. “That is why we are holding one another today,” the minister said.
Tured Mong, a pensioner, said she had driven 40 miles with her husband to bring flowers from her garden and a candle she wanted to light. “I only want to lay them down here,” Ms. Mong said outside the cathedral. “I am sorry for all the parents waiting to find some news who don’t know about their children.”
Evy Andersen, from Oslo, brought a sunflower from her garden. “I have a niece who has been to this camp twice, and she has many friends who are missing. She is wondering about them. I did this for her and for myself.”
News reports spoke of immigrants arriving at the cathedral before the service to show respect for the dead. Lemeo Le, a refugee from Vietnam 21 years ago, said: “Norway helped the Vietnamese people to come here. They were very welcoming. I have a job and a family, and I wanted to come. It is very sad for all the young people.”
Borge Wilhemsen, a Labor Party activist, said he drove for five hours to be at the memorial service and brought his 6-year-old daughter. “You can’t take them away from everything,” he said, referring to his daughter. “They have to learn that life is sometimes hard. I have not told her everything. I told her that there were two big accidents.”
In video footage broadcast by Norwegian television stations on Sunday, Geir Lippestad, Mr. Breivik’s lawyer, said his client would address a court hearing on Monday about what he had done. “He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” the lawyer said. Mr. Breivik has “admitted his guilt to the actual facts,” the lawyer said, declining to go into detail. He added, “This is an action that has been planned for some time.”

Train Wreck in China

BEIJING — A train accident in eastern China over the weekend has added to a national sense that safety is taking a back seat to the country’s spectacular infrastructure development.

Zhaoyun/European Pressphoto Agency

Workers sorted through the wreckage of train carriages which had fallen off a bridge in Wenzhou, east China's Zhejiang province on Sunday. At least 35 people were killed and 210 injured.

The wreck on Saturday night killed 35 and injured 210 after a high-speed train lost power for more than 20 minutes and then was rear-ended by another train, according to the Xinhua news agency. Six cars derailed and two fell off a viaduct near the city of Wenzhou.
By Sunday night, rescuers said they did not expect to recover more bodies, although some of the dead were still being identified.
Government officials responded switftly, with President Hu Jintao calling the rescue work a national priority. China’s railway minister, Sheng Guangzu, rushed to the scene to supervise operations. Mr. Sheng took control of the powerful ministry earlier this year after his predecessor and several associates were fired and investigated for corruption.
But China’s vocal online bloggers expressed anger at the priorities highlighted by the rescue.
Photos on the popular Weibo microblogging service showed backhoes burying the wrecked train near the site. Critics said the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction, but the railway ministry said that the trains contain valuable national technology and could not be left in the open in case it fell into the wrong hands.
Foreign companies maintain that some crucial technology was stolen from their imported trains. But more importantly to domestic audiences is the perception of a coverup. Initial reports of how the accident occurred are already being partly contradicted by reports in the official media.
The Railway Ministry issued a statement Saturday night that said the first train had been struck by lightning and lost power. It did not explain why the second train was not signaled to stop. In addition, new reports on Xinhua indicate that the first train had started to move by the time it was struck. The ministry has not explained the discrepency.
The wreck is one of several high-profile public transportation accidents in China recently. Early Friday, 41 people died when an overloaded bus caught fire in central China’s Henan province.
Earlier this month, an escalator at a subway station in Beijing collapsed, killing one and injuring 28. Last week alone, four bridges collapsed in various Chinese cities.
Signaling government concern over growing public unease, the government issued a directive Saturday calling for “intensified efforts in preventing major deadly accidents.”
Discussion of accidents in China, however, is haphazard. In an unusually frank editorial in the Communist Party paper, People’s Daily earlier this month, a commentator said China needed “zero tolerance for concealing major accidents.” But the commentator said many disasters are covered up, such as a major oil spill that was hidden from public view for over a month.
The sense that transparency and safety is secondary to other concerns was present in many Weibo postings Sunday. One blogger in particular posted an eloquent appeal for more care and caution in China’s rapid development:
“China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience! Don’t let the train run out off track, don’t let the bridges collapse, don’t let the roads become traps, don’t let houses become ruins. Walk slowly, allowing every life to have freedom and dignity. No one should be left behind by our era.”

China: Death Toll Increases in Sinkiang

The authorities have increased the death toll in a clash on Monday in the restive western border region of Xinjiang, saying now that 18 people died in the violence. The state media reported on Monday that two police officers and two hostages had died in an attack on a police station in the city of Hotan. But state media said Wednesday that 14 others had also died in the attack. Exile groups representing the region’s largest minority, the Uighurs, said that the police had opened fired on unarmed demonstrators. But the state media said that protesters had attacked the station with grenades and explosives. Over the past two years, a series of riots and protests against the country’s majority ethnic group, the Han, has resulted in hundreds of deaths.

China: Fire on Overloaded Bus Kills 41

An overloaded double-decker bus burst into flames on a highway in central China early Friday, killing 41 people on board and injuring 6, the state media said. The official Xinhua News Agency said the six passengers who managed to escape the fire in Xinyang, in Henan Province, were all hospitalized, with one in critical condition. It said the bus, a sleeper coach, had a 35-passenger limit but was carrying 47 people It was unclear what caused the blaze.

Death Toll Rises to 91 in Norway Attacks

OSLO — The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a 32-year-old man, whom they identified as a Christian fundamentalist with right-wing connections, over the bombing of a government center here and a shooting attack on a nearby island that together left at least 91 people dead.

The police said they did not know if the man, identified in the Norwegian press as Anders Behring Breivik, was part of a larger conspiracy. He is being questioned under the country’s terrorism laws and is cooperating with the investigation, they said.
“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised press conference, adding: “What we know is that he is right-wing and a Christian fundamentalist.” So far Mr. Breivik has not been linked to any anti-jihadist groups, he said.
Johan Fredriksen, chief of staff for the Oslo police, said they “are not surprised” that the attack had been the work of an ethnic Norwegian, a blond, blue-eyed man, saying “we think about scenarios.”
Soldiers were arriving in Oslo early Saturday to secure government buildings a day after the attacks, the deadliest on Norwegian soil since World War II.
The explosions in Oslo, from one or more bombs, turned the tidy Scandinavian capital into a scene reminiscent of terrorist attacks in Baghdad or Oklahoma City, panicking people and blowing out the windows of several government buildings, including one housing the office of the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, who was unharmed.
Even as the police locked down a large area of the city after the blasts, the suspect, dressed as a police officer, entered the youth camp on the island of Utoya, about 19 miles northwest of Oslo, a Norwegian security official said, and opened fire. “He said it was a routine check in connection with the terror attack in Oslo,” one witness told VG Nett, the Web site of a national newspaper.
The police said the suspect had used “a machine pistol” in the attack, but declined to provide further details.
Of the at least 84 people killed on the island, some were as young as 16, the police said on national television early Saturday. They said the death toll could rise further as they continue to search for bodies in the waters around the island.
Terrified youths jumped into the water to escape. “Kids have started to swim in a panic, and Utoya is far from the mainland,” said Bjorn Jarle Roberg-Larsen, a Labor Party member who spoke by phone with teenagers on the island, which has no bridge to the mainland. “Others are hiding. Those I spoke with don’t want to talk more. They’re scared to death.”
Many could not flee in time.
“He first shot people on the island,” a 15-year-old camper named Elise told The Associated Press. “Afterward he started shooting people in the water.”
Most of the campers were teenagers but there were also adults on the island, who may have been among the victims.
After the shooting the police seized a 32-year-old Norwegian man on the island, according to the police and Justice Minister Knut Storberget. He was later identified as Anders Behring Breivik and characterized by officials as a right-wing extremist, citing previous writings including on his Facebook page.
The acting police chief, Sveinung Sponheim, said the suspect’s Internet postings “suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views, but if that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen.”
He said the suspect had also been seen in Oslo before the explosions. The police and other authorities declined to say what the suspect’s motivations might have been, but many speculated that the target was Mr. Stoltenberg’s liberal government.
“The police have every reason to believe there is a connection between the explosions and what happened at Utoya,” the police said. They said they later recovered explosives on the island.
Mr. Breivik had registered a farm-related business in Rena, in eastern Norway, which the authorities said allowed him to order a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, an ingredient that can be used to make explosives. Authorities were investigating whether the chemical may have been used in the bombing.

Latest news about Norway attack kills 87

Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old suspect in Friday's attacks in Norway, held right-wing views, say police.

 

Both Mr Breivik's Facebook and Twitter entries are only a few days old

Police chief Sveinung Sponheim said his internet postings "suggest that he has some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views".
"But whether that was a motivation for the actual act remains to be seen," he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Little is currently known about him apart from what has appeared on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter - and these entries appear to have been set up just days ago.
On the Facebook page attributed to him, he describes himself as a Christian and a conservative. The Facebook page is no longer available but it also listed interests such as body-building and freemasonry.
The gunman was described by witnesses who saw him on Utoeya island as tall and blond - and dressed in a police uniform. The image of him posted on Facebook depict a blond, blue-eyed man.
The Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang quoted a friend as saying that the suspect turned to right-wing extremism when in his late 20s. The paper also said that he participated in online forums expressing strong nationalistic views.
Bomb ingredient Mr Breivik is thought to have studied at the Oslo Commerce School and his work is listed as Breivik Geofarm, a company Norwegian media is describing as a farming sole proprietorship.
The company was set up to cultivate vegetables, melons, roots and tubers, Norway's TV2 says, and speculation in local media is rife that through such a link he may have had access to fertiliser, an ingredient used in bomb-making.
A Twitter account attributed to the suspect has also emerged but it only has one post, which is a quote from philosopher John Stuart Mill: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."
As with his Facebook page, the tweet was posted on 17 July.
It reveals very little about the man except an interest in libertarianism and a clear belief in the power of the individual.