World food prices fell to almost a seven-year low at the start of the year on the back of sharp declines in commodities, particularly sugar, according to the latest data from the United Nations (UN).

The Food Price Index, published by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), averaged 150.4 points in January, down 16 percent from a year earlier and registering its lowest level since April 2009.

The trade-weighted index tracks international market prices for five key commodity groups -- major cereals, vegetable oils, dairy, meat and sugar – on a monthly basis.


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The main factors underlying the lingering decline in basic food commodity prices are "the generally ample agricultural supply conditions, a slowing global economy, and the strengthening of the U.S. dollar," the FAO noted. Food commodities are not the only ones suffering from demand failing to keep up with a glut in supply with oil prices suffering a similar fate with a steady decline since mid-2014.

Signaling no let-up in production, the food agency raised its forecasts for worldwide cereal crops in 2016. "As a result of the upgraded production and downgraded consumption forecasts, world cereal stocks are set to end the 2016 seasons at 642 million tons, higher than they began," the agency noted.
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But Sanders voters are a unique lot, and Clinton campaign strategists are growing concerned about whether they will be there for her should she be the Democratic pick.

This is not a group that is particularly loyal to the Democratic Party. While liberal Democrats make up a big chunk of Sanders’ support, many other backers are independents. Some mistrust the party so much that Sanders supporters booed the party chair when she took the stage Friday night at a dinner at which the candidates spoke.

Zanecchia’s second choice for president is Donald Trump.

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Hillary will:

• Give working families a raise, and tax relief that helps them manage rising costs.


• Create good-paying jobs and get pay rising by investing in infrastructure, clean energy, and scientific and medical research to strengthen our economy and growth.


• Close corporate tax loopholes and make the most fortunate pay their fair share.


[font size="3"]Hillary believes the defining economic challenge of our time is raising incomes for hardworking Americans.[/font]

Too many families are working harder and harder, but still not getting ahead. Our country is standing again, but we’re not yet running the way we should be. From her first day in office to the last, Hillary Clinton will fight for you and for more take-home pay so you can get ahead and stay ahead.

Hillary understands that in order to raise incomes, we need strong growth, fair growth, and long-term growth. And she has a plan to get us there.


Strong growth

Hillary will invest in infrastructure, clean energy, and scientific and medical research to create jobs and strengthen our economy. And she’ll provide tax relief to working families and small businesses. That’s how we’ll move toward a full employment economy that creates jobs, pushes businesses to compete over workers, and raises incomes.



Strong growth

Provide tax relief for families. Hillary will cut taxes for hard-working families to increase their take-home pay as they face rising costs from child care, health care, and sending their kids to college. She is calling for extending a tax cut of up to $2,500 per student to help deal with college costs as part of her New College Compact, and for cutting taxes for businesses that share profits with their employees.

Unleash small business growth. Hillary’s father owned a small business—and she understands that small businesses are the backbone of jobs and growth in America. She’s put forward a small-business agenda to expand access to capital, provide tax relief, cut red tape, and help small businesses bring their goods to new markets.

Create a New College Compact. Hillary’s New College Compact will invest $350 billion so that students do not have to borrow to pay tuition at a public college in their state. Her plan will also significantly cut interest rates on student loans and enable an estimated 25 million Americans with student debt to refinance at today’s lower rates, saving the typical borrower $2,000 over the life of their loans.

Boost public investment in infrastructure and scientific research. One of the best ways to drive jobs and improve our nation’s competitiveness is to invest in infrastructure and scientific research. Hillary has called for a national infrastructure bank that would leverage public and private funds to invest in projects across the country. She will call for reform that closes corporate tax loopholes and drives investment here, in the U.S. And she would increase funding for scientific research at agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Lift up participation in the workforce—especially for women. For too long, issues like equal pay, paid leave, and affordable child care have been put off to the side as "women's issues." Hillary believes they are crucial to our competitiveness and growth—and to lifting incomes for working families.


Fair growth

Inequality is a drag on our economy, and to get incomes rising again, we need to renew our country’s basic bargain. With near-record corporate profits and stagnant wages, the deck is stacked against working Americans. If you work hard, you deserve to get ahead and stay ahead.

fair growth 2


Ensure more workers share in near-record corporate profits. Corporate profits are near record highs—but workers have not shared through rising wages. Profit sharing is linked to higher pay, benefits, and productivity. That’s why Hillary’s plan creates a 15 percent tax credit for companies that share profits with workers on top of wages and pay increases.

Raising the minimum wage and strengthening overtime rules. Hillary believes we are long overdue in raising the minimum wage. She has supported raising the federal minimum wage to $12, and believes that we should go further than the federal minimum through state and local efforts, and workers organizing and bargaining for higher wages, such as the Fight for 15 and recent efforts in Los Angeles and New York to raise their minimum wage to $15. She also supports the Obama administration’s expansion of overtime rules to millions more workers.

Reform our tax code so the wealthiest pay their fair share. Hillary supports ending the “carried interest” loophole, enacting the “Buffett Rule” that ensures no millionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than their secretary, and closing tax loopholes and expenditures that benefit the wealthiest taxpayers to pay for her plan to make college affordable and refinance student debt.

Expand early learning. Hillary’s proposal would work to ensure that every 4-year-old in America has access to high-quality preschool in the next 10 years.


Long-term growth

It's time to push back against the forces of "quarterly capitalism" and boom and bust cycles on Wall Street.



Long-term growth

Put an end to “quarterly capitalism.” We need an economy where companies plan for the long run and invest in their workers through increased wages and better training—leading to higher productivity, better service, and larger profits. Hillary will revamp the capital gains tax to reward farsighted investments that create jobs. She’ll address the rising influence of the kinds of so-called “activist” shareholders that focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth, and she’ll reform executive compensation to better align the interests of executives with long-term value.

Impose accountability on Wall Street. Nowhere will the shift from short-term to long-term thinking be more important than on Wall Street. Hillary will defend the Wall Street reforms put in place after the financial crisis—and she’ll go further. She’ll tackle dangerous risks in the financial sector, and she’ll appoint and empower tough, independent regulators and prosecute individuals and firms when they commit fraud or other criminal wrong-doing.

The attorney for the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown has endorsed Hillary Clinton, according to her campaign.

Civil rights attorney Benjamin L. Crump, who received widespread national media attention for representing the two slain black teenagers' families, will campaign for Clinton in South Carolina. Martin was 17 when he was fatally shot in 2012 by former neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who was ultimately acquitted. Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson in 2014.


“Crump will talk to South Carolina voters about what’s at stake in this election and Hillary Clinton’s strong record of fighting for families,” the campaign said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. “He will highlight how Clinton is the only one who will stand up to the gun lobby, has a plan to reform our criminal justice system, and understands the issues that keep families up at night.” The news was first reported by BuzzFeed.
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Clinton commended Michigan's elected Democratic representatives Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters for pushing to pass $200 million in federal aid to the city, and called on Congress to pass the spending package "immediately." She also proposed dispatching more AmeriCorps volunteers to the community, as well as a way to "hire and empower citizens of Flint to do the work that needs to be done in this city."

"I know this is going to take time and it's not going to be easy," she said. "Repairing trust is as important as repairing pipes. We have to trust each other, to count on each other."

After her campaign announced the visit earlier this week, some Republican critics alleged Clinton was using the crisis to bolster her image just days before the New Hampshire primary. On Sunday, however, the former secretary of state said it was important to keep the national media on the story.

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Clinton closed the approximately 20-minute long speech with an impassioned plea for Americans not to forget the residents of Flint, and promised to return as president of the United States.
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How information is transferred from biological molecules to crystalline surfaces could pave the way for the development of new drugs and other synthetic materials.

New research, published today in Nature Chemistry, explains how biological molecules can change the shape of minerals by controlling how they link together.

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"In the biological world, we see inorganic minerals being shaped with remarkable control but until now we haven't understood how it was happening at the level of the atoms," explains Professor Hofer.

"Now we see that the organic molecules are acting as a scaffold, dictating where the atoms of the minerals are placed and how they are linked together - a bit like building blocks. And as they do this, the biomolecules transfer their left or right-handed nature, or chirality, to the crystal structure.

"By understanding this process, we can now force materials to behave in a certain way, using biological plans to create the shapes and structures that we want. This has huge potential in the fields of materials design and drug synthesis."
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The taxes Sanders is calling for are in a different league from any peacetime Democratic candidate in history. The single-payer health plan alone, according to the estimates of the Sanders campaign, requires raising as much revenue as the federal government collected in 2013 through the individual income and estate taxes. In other words, we’d need to double that revenue. To do so, Sanders proposes the following: a 6.2 percent increase in payroll taxes; a 2.2 percent increase in income taxes on everyone; higher estate taxes; taxing capital gains and interest as ordinary income; limiting tax deductions for the rich; and higher income-tax rates on the upper brackets.

To be sure, Sanders says that Americans would save money because they wouldn’t be paying private insurance premiums. But his plan has no limits on the scope of coverage and no patient cost-sharing—it transfers all private health spending into the Treasury, without any clear means of cost restraint. Free can be expensive. The plan would create winners and losers: The losers will surely fight it, and many of those who might be winners won’t trust the federal government enough to go along with it.

The taxes for Sanders’s health plan, combined with other tax increases on wages he’s proposed, would raise the top marginal federal rate to 77 percent, as Dylan Matthews shows at Vox. In addition to those taxes on earnings, Sanders is calling for an increase in the capital-gains tax, a new financial-transaction tax, and a new carbon tax.

The last of these, the carbon tax, is a good idea and a hard sell in itself. But the total package is not a platform that Democrats can run on—it’s a platform they’re going to run from. And it is a fantasy-come-true for Republicans. For decades, they’ve been falsely accusing Democrats of favoring huge tax increases. In this case, it would be the truth.
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