A service that the Kaiser Family Foundation is offering allows access to online coverage of the conference. Kaisernetwork.org’s extensive conference coverage will include live and tape-delayed webcasts of select session; podcasts available in Spanish and English; interviews with newsmakers and journalists; and daily narrated video highlights of major conference developments and much more.

Everyday from August 3-8, Kaisernetwork.org will be sending out a daily update email featuring highlights from the conference. They hope you will consider forwarding the daily update email to members of your listserv for that week, to help extend the reach of the conference. This is a highly useful service because the information presented in this conference will be relevant to the public, researchers, scientists, advocates and policymakers alike. Sign up for the email at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2008.

In addition to the daily conference update email, we also have a variety of syndication options that allow organizations and individuals to feature content on their Web sites, blogs and social networking pages. For more information and to see examples of partners’ sites that syndicated content from the 2006 International AIDS Conference, visit http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2008/syndication.cfm.

From Christina Page’s Blog. See http://birthcontrolwatch.org/blog/. You can also go to http://www.allexperts.com/el/1445-9/Birth-Control/ for “advice” from Diane Cheryl on birth control.
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For anyone seeking advice about an important decision, a google search is often the gateway to frustration and confusion. That’s why allexperts.com would seem like a great idea. Allexperts.com was founded on the idea that mixing good intentions and expertise could help many. The site welcomes people who have real knowledge in an area to become “allexperts” and these “experts” agree to help those looking for answers for free. As the “about us” section of allexperts.com explains, “Our experts are all volunteers, people with knowledge in their area of expertise who are willing to share their knowledge with others. We can’t guarantee they can answer every question, but we can guarantee that most try to help.”
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Family planning groups and at least one member of Congress objected on Tuesday to a Bush administration memo that defines several widely used contraception methods as abortion and protects the right of medical providers to refuse to offer them.

The proposal would cut off federal funds to hospitals and states that attempt to compel medical providers to offer legal abortion and contraception services to women.

For full article, visit:
http://www.reuters.com

Reproductive rights advocates issued a collective condemnation Tuesday of a draft proposal by the Bush administration to set new restrictions on domestic family planning programs.

Under the draft proposal, federally funded hospitals and clinics that provide family planning services would be required to promise in writing that they will turn a blind eye to health care providers’ views on abortion and certain kinds of birth control, such as emergency contraception.

For full article, visit:
http://www.womensenews.org/article

PMC’s 2006 program in Niger, Gobe da Haske (“Tomorrow Will be a Brighter Day”), has been featured in the current issue of Soul Beat. Visit the link below for the full article.

http://www.comminit.com/en/node/270336/38

“Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections,” an original ECSP video, offers a lively, brief, and accessible explanation of population-health-environment connections, with examples and photos from successful programs in the Philippines. View the video on YouTube, then rate it, comment on it, favorite it, or post a video response.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGUtXzU-xb8

Presenter Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke at the Wilson Center earlier this year as part of ECSP’s PHE meeting series. www.wilsoncenter.org/next10

Thanks to Phil Dodd for this article.
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If the USA seems too crowded and its roads too congested now, imagine future generations: The nation’s population could more than triple to 1 billion as early as 2100.

That’s the eye-popping projection that urban and rural planners, gathered today for their annual meeting in Las Vegas, are hearing from a land-use expert.

“What do we do now to start preparing for that?” asks Arthur Nelson, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, whose analysis projects that the USA will hit the 1 billion mark sometime between 2100 and 2120. “It’s a realistic long-term challenge.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.usatoday.com/news

Thanks to Leon Kolankiewicz for this article.
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The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it. According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.
The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa.

For full article, visit:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal states…

For full article, visit:
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008

David Bloom-Population and Economics (PDF, 484KB)

I recently read this interesting paper by David Bloom and David Canning, which is being published by Population and Development Review. It is an excellent analysis, although I think the paper could give more attention to the mechanism by which lower fertility leads to greater savings. It refers to longer life spans giving incentive to save for retirement, but it seems to me, that while it refers to work by Princeton demographer Ansley Coale, it skips over Coale’s contention that lower fertility allows less of family income to be spent on food, housing and clothing for children, automatically freeing up some funds to be used for: a. savings, thus building capital for business to borrow and grow; b. education and infrastructure, thus building economic productivity; and c. elective goods, thus stimulating the manufacturing sector.
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