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The Club PUBlication 09/25/2023

8/28/2023

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Can’t get in 10,000 steps a day? Even 4,000 has benefits
By VICTORIA BISSET - Washington Post

Achieving 10,000 steps per day is a common fitness goal, but there's a lack of scientific evidence that it's the ideal number for everyone.

Now, a study has found that significant health benefits may begin with as few as 4,000 steps per day.

A team of scientists led by Maciej Banach, a professor of preventive cardiology at the Medical Academy of Lodz in Poland, analyzed 17 studies that followed more than 200,000 people for an average of just over seven years.

The analysis showed that benefits began at around 2,300 steps per day, which was associated with a significant reduced risk of dying of cardiovascular disease. At around 4,000 steps, the risk of dying of any cause also began to fall significantly. Both figures — which represent medians — are under the 5,000-step limit for what the study notes is normally considered to be a sedentary lifestyle.

But there were benefits beyond these numbers: Every extra 1,000 steps was associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of dying of any cause, while an increase of 500 steps per day was associated with a 7% reduction in the risk of death of cardiovascular disease, the study said.

Banach, the study's lead author, said t hat his findings weren't meant to undermine those with 10,000 steps as a goal but to offer hope to people who are struggling to reach that number.

"It is a very important message because I have had many patients that were simply discouraged" when he tried to persuade them to aim for between 7,000 and 10,000 steps per day, he said.

The findings were published i n the peer-reviewed European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Insufficient physical activity is the fourth-leading risk for death around the world, accounting for about 3.2 million deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization — which measures exercise requirements by time and intensity rather than steps. One study last year found that global physical activity levels — already below 10,000 steps per day on average across the world — had dropped after the COVID-19 outbreak and had not returned to pre-pandemic levels by February 2022.

The advice to aim to walk 10,000 steps every day wasn't originally born out of scientific data but came from a Japanese marketing ploy that used a name loosely translated as "10,000- step meter" to sell pedometers .

But U.S. guidelines on physical activities note that people still may choose goals such as walking 10,000 steps as a way to meet their exercise requirements.

Banach stressed that the review's findings aren't meant to encourage people to reduce their daily step count but to aim as high as possible — with the most notable benefits found between 7,000 and 13,000 steps per day for people under 60 and between 6,000 and 10,000 steps for older adults, according to the results.

The study determined that the benefits applied across different countries and genders.

The main findings on the benefits of extra steps each day are clear, Banach says: "The more, the better."

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The Club PUBlication 08/21/2023

8/21/2023

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Severe weather leads to unprecedented losses

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN Associated Press

Verviers, Belgium Cars piled up at a roundabout after heavy rains and floods across western Europe. Photograph: François Walschaerts/AFP/Getty Image

Waves of severe thunderstorms in the U.S. during the first half of this year led to $34 billion in insured losses, an unprecedented level in such a short time, according to Swiss Re Group, as climate change contributes to the frequency and severity of violent meteorological events.

Damage from convective storms in the U.S., those that can come with hail, lightning, heavy rain and high winds, accounted for nearly 70% of the $50 billion in global catastrophic destruction so far this year, the reinsurer said Wednesday. Those global figures include earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

The storms in the U.S. were so severe there were 10 that resulted in $ 1 billion or more in damage, almost double the average recorded over the past decade, according to Swiss Re, and Texas was the state most severely effected.

"The effects of climate change can already be seen in certain perils like heat waves, droughts, floods and extreme precipitation," Swiss Re Group chief economist Jean Haegeli said in a prepared statement. "Besides the impact of climate change, land use planning in more exposed coastal and riverine areas, and urban sprawl into the wilderness, generate a hard-to-revert combination of high-value exposure in higher risk environments."

There have been a multitude of high-profile meteorological events to start the second half of the year including heat waves in the U.S., northwestern China and southern Europe, and wildfires on Greek islands, Italy and in Algeria.

Damage and insurance losses from those events are still being tallied, Swiss Re said.

The figures for the first half of the year are in line with a report last month from another reinsurer, Munich Re, which said the series of thunderstorms that raked Texas in June was the most expensive single event in the U.S. for the year so far. The overall loss from those storms alone is estimated at approximately $8.4 billion.

"Devastating storms, which now seem to be the norm rather than the exception, are expected to continue to grow in intensity and severity," wrote Marcus Winter, CEO, North America at Munich Reinsurance America.

Winter said that it is "imperative" to act immediately in preparing communities for the "physical and financial risks of future climate-related weather events."

Reinsurers are the insurance industry's insurers, covering losses that could upend an individual company.

Munich Re and Swiss Re have operations across the globe, including the U.S. Kerry Symons is a businessman in Perryton, a town of about 8,500 in the Texas Panhandle, one of the communities struck by a tornado in June, and he is also its mayor. Three of his buildings were damaged or destroyed, including a furniture store. He also lost some vehicles.

Symons said he is like most residents in Perrytown in that he is still arguing with insurance companies. Some residents have sought his assistance as mayor.

"There's not a whole lot we can do for them as a city," he explained.
One lesson Symons has learned from the ordeal is the importance of an annual accounting for the cost of what is inside a building and what it would cost to rebuild. The furniture store was acquired recently so the valuation was easy. Another building that he has owned for 20 years has proved more difficult.

The increasing frequency of extreme weather has created disruptions within the insurance industry and some insurers have retreated from states that are getting hit hard, such as Florida and California.

The pullback by insurers is happening despite years of skyrocketing premiums for property owners in those states.

State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from California's home insurance market, saying that increasing wildfire risk and soaring construction costs mean they will no longer write new policies in the nation's most populous state.

Last month Travelers said catastrophe losses doubled in its most recent quarter, and the company, considered a bellwether for the insurance industry due to its size, said it lost money.

AAA has said that it will not renew "a very small percentage" of homeowners and auto insurance policies in hurricane-plagued Florida, joining other insurers in limiting their exposure in the Sunshine State despite efforts by lawmakers to calm the volatile insurance market.

AAA insists it's not leaving Florida, but that last year's devastating hurricane season had led to an unprecedented rise in reinsurance rates, making it more costly to operate there.

Florida has struggled to maintain stability in the state insurance market since 1992 when Hurricane Andrew flattened Homestead, wiped out some insurance carriers and left many remaining insurers anxious about writing or renewing policies in Florida.

Risks for carriers have also been growing as climate change increases the strength of hurricanes and the intensity of rainstorms.

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The Club PUBlication 08/14/2023 (Rep Climate Strategy)

8/14/2023

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Republican 2024 climate strategy: Less clean energy
Think tank’s ‘‘battle plan’’ part of effort to dramatically reshape the executive branch.

By LISA FRIEDMAN New York Times

When will we wake up and realize that "Global Warming" is not only REAL but it is HERE!, and It is affecting our lives. Think this summer has been bad? Just wait. If we don't start to make progress it will get worse . . . much worse.
Harv

During a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for a future Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming.

The move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed Project 2025 that Paul Dans of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank organizing the effort, has called a "battle plan" for the first 180 days of a future Republican presidency.

The climate and energy provisions would be among the most severe swings away from current federal policies.

The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.

The New York Times asked the leading Republican presidential candidates whether they support the Project 2025 strategy, but none of the campaigns responded. Still, several of the architects are veterans of the Trump administration, and their recommendations match positions held by former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination.

The $22 million project also includes personnel lists and a transition strategy in the event a Republican wins the 2024 election. The nearly 1,000-page plan, which would reshape the executive branch to place more power into the president's hands, outlines changes for nearly every agency across the government.

The Heritage Foundation worked on the plan with dozens of conservative groups ranging from the Heartland Institute, which has denied climate science, to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says "climate change does not endanger the survival of civilization or the habitability of the planet."

Dans said the Heritage Foundation delivered the blueprint to every Republican presidential hopeful. While polls have found that young Republicans are worried about global warming, Dans said the feedback he has received confirms the blueprint reflects where the majority of party leaders stand.

"We have gotten very good reception from this," he said.
"This is a plotting of points of where the conservative movement sits at this time."

There is a pronounced partisan split in the country when it comes to climate change, surveys have shown. An NPR/ PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month found that while 56% of respondents called climate change a major threat — including a majority of independents and nearly 90% of Democrats — about 70% of Republicans said global warming was either a minor threat or no threat at all.

Project 2025 does not offer any proposals for curbing the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet and which scientists have said must be sharply and quickly reduced to avoid the most catastrophic impacts.

Asked what the U.S. should do to combat climate change, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation's energy and climate center, said, "I really hadn't thought about it in those terms" and then offered that Americans should use more natural gas.

The blueprint said the next Republican president would help repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that is offering $370 billion for wind, solar, nuclear, green hydrogen and electric vehicle technology, with most of the new investments taking place in Republican-led states.

The plan calls for shuttering a Department of Energy office that has $400 billion in loan authority to help emerging green technologies. It would make it more difficult for solar, wind and other renewable power — the fastest-growing energy source in the United States — to be added to the grid. Climate change would no longer be considered an issue worthy of discussion on the National Security Council, and allied nations would be encouraged to buy and use more fossil fuels rather than renewable energy.

The blueprint throws open the door to drilling inside the pristine Arctic wilderness, promises legal protections for energy companies that kill birds while extracting oil and gas, and declares the federal government has an "obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources" on public lands.

Notably, it also would restart a quest for something climate denialists have long considered their holy grail: reversal of a 2009 scientific finding at the Environmental Protection Agency that says carbon dioxide emissions are a danger to public health.

Erasing that finding, conservatives have long believed, would essentially strip the federal government of the right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from most sources.

In interviews, Dans and three of the top authors of the report agreed that the climate is changing. But they insisted that scientists are debating the extent to which human activity is responsible.

On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists around the world agree that the burning of oil, gas and coal since the Industrial Age has led to an increase of the average global temperature of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit .

The plan calls on the government to stop trying to make automobiles more fuel efficient and to block states from adopting California's stringent automobile pollution standards.

Dans said a mandate of Project 2025 is to "investigate whether the dimensions of climate change exist and what can actually be done." As for the influence of burning fossil fuels, he said, "I think the science is still out on that quite frankly."

In actuality, top scientists in the United States concluded in an exhaustive study produced during the Trump administration that humans — the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy — are to blame. "There is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence," scientists wrote.

Climate advocates said the Republican strategy would take the country in the wrong direction even as heat waves, droughts and wildfires worsen because of emissions.

"This agenda would be laughable if the consequences of it weren't so dire," said Christy Goldfuss, chief policy impact officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Republicans who have called for their party to accept climate change said they were disappointed by the blueprint and worried about the direction of the party.

"It's out-of-touch Beltway silliness and it's not meeting Americans where they are," said Sarah Hunt, president of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, which works with Republican state officials on energy needs.

She called efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is pouring money and jobs into red states, particularly impractical.

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The Club PUBlication 08/07/2023

8/7/2023

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Couple out $9M in crypto scheme
Scammer also encouraged Eden Prairie husband to abandon his wife.

By PAUL WALSH [email protected]

The enticement of a cryptocurrency jackpot mixed with professed true love proved to be a costly combination for a Twin Cities man who kept his wife in the dark about the siphoning of their savings.

Police say the Eden Prairie resident was cheated out of more than $9 million over an increasingly costly halfyear span when someone he connected with on LinkedIn reeled him in with promises of quick riches and a plea for him to abandon his wife and run off together.

"No one in the office has heard of a crypto fraud case as big," John Stiles, spokesman for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, said of how the monetary loss ranks among their cryptocurrency scam investigations. "In fact, their eyes popped when I told them the amount."

The slippery-slope disappearance of the couple's money is detailed in a search warrant affidavit that an Eden Prairie police detective filed in Hennepin County District Court asking permission for him to scrutinize the man's financial dealings from Dec. 21 to June 8, when the last of the wire transactions was made.

The supposed investments the man believed would yield big cryptocurrency returns went from routinely topping $100,000 to $2.1 million in a single transaction in the scheme's waning days, the filing disclosed.

The damage, according the detective, who specializes in cryptocurrency and romance scams: $9.2 million in 21 transactions.

In the simplest terms, crypto currency is unregulated digital money, which is usually named by the company offering it. You buy a certain amount and your transaction is recorded in a digital ledger, which down the line is used to make sure you have enough of a balance to cover your transaction.

Here's how Eden Prairie police say in the search warrant affidavit the scam played out: Police learned from the husband that his LinkedIn connection said she "wanted him to leave his wife for her" at some point while directing him to make large deposits from his U.S. Bank account into accounts with other banks for investment in crypto currency.

From there, as these fraud schemes often play out, the money goes into encrypted digital cryptocurrency wallets that only the scammer controls.

In this case, "the suspects never invested [the man's] money on his behalf, but instead used [it] to purchase cryptocurrency on their own behalf," according to the filing.

The man believed he was investing in "Coinruleweb3."
Seeing a quick profit in his investment led him to believe everything was on the up-and-up, but he was told he needed to pay the $2.8 million fee to collect his windfall.

On June 15, the man's wife alerted police that he had been liquidating their investment accounts for the past six months. She said her husband "called her in a panic" the previous day and told her to withdraw all their remaining assets to pay the fee so he could cash in his cryptocurrency funds, according to the affidavit.

Police determined with a simple internet search that Coinrule-web3 is associated with numerous "cryptocurrency and romance scams."
Police also noted that one of the banks that received the deposits is commonly used to launder stolen money.

"Losses on crypto fraud tend to be for significantly greater amounts than other types of fraud," Stiles, of the Attorney General's Office, said. "We have seen senior citizens lose their entire life's savings and take out multiple mortgages on their homes to get more funds for the scam."

Police have declined to reveal anything about the couple in this investigation, nor are they willing to offer an update on progress toward an arrest or charges in what they say is one of four cryptocurrency fraud cases they have investigated so far this year.

Eden Prairie police "have not investigated other cryptocurrency-related fraud cases where private individuals lost money close to the amount reported lost in this case," said Police Department spokeswoman Joyce Lorenz.

The FBI's assessment of a typical case of cryptocurrency fraud has strong similarities to how the victim in Eden Prairie got roped in and swindled.

These schemes usually take root "when fraudsters contact victims on social media or dating application sites, portraying some sort of 'innocent' connection when in all actuality it's a heavily scripted, calculated first move of many to build rapport and gain trust," read an FBI statement in March.

"Eventually, these conversations lead to discussions of investment opportunities, wherein victims are lured into investing cryptocurrency funds using fake website/ apps that allow them to track their investment progress.

"The deception becomes apparent when victims attempt to cash out their investments, or when communication with the fraudster is terminated."

In 2022, investment fraud tallied the highest losses, $3.31 billion, of any scams reported by the public to the FBI's Internet Crimes Complaint Center, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Frauds involving cryptocurrency represented the majority of these scams, increasing 183% from 2021 to $2.57 billion in reported losses last year.
The FBI has found that many of these reported frauds came from victims ages 30 to 49. In these schemes, often called "Sha Zhu Pan," a Chinese phrase that loosely translates to "pig butchering," scammers often prey on people through social networking and online communications platforms, dating websites, and phone calls and text messages that are meant to appear to have been misdialed.

The FBI offers this cautionary advice:
Watch closely for website domain names that impersonate legitimate financial institutions, especially cryptocurrency exchanges, or ones that may have misspelled or slight differences from actual financial institutions.

Refrain from downloading or using suspicious-looking apps as tools for investing.

Before buying digital currency, carefully research what is being offered and who is offering it.

The FBI wants anyone who has been the target of a cryptocurrency investment fraud scheme to report it as quickly as possible to the agency's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3.gov), a local FBI office and the legitimate financial institution involved.

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The Club PUBlication 09/25/2023

Can’t get in 10,000 steps a day? Even 4,000 has benefitsBy VICTORIA BISSET - Washington Post

​Achieving 10,000 steps per day is a common fitness goal, but there's a lack of scientific evidence that it's the ideal number for everyone.

The Club PUBlication 08/21/2023

​Severe weather leads to unprecedented losses​By MICHELLE CHAPMAN Associated Press

The Club PUBlication 08/14/2023 (Rep Climate Strategy)

​Republican 2024 climate strategy: Less clean energyThink tank’s ‘‘battle plan’’ part of effort to dramatically reshape the executive branch.​By LISA FRIEDMAN New York Times

​When will we wake up and realize that "Global Warming" is not only REAL but it is HERE!, and It is affecting our lives. Think this summer has been bad? Just wait. If we don't start to make progress it will get worse . . . much worse.​Harv

The Club PUBlication 08/07/2023

Couple out $9M in crypto schemeScammer also encouraged Eden Prairie husband to abandon his wife.By PAUL WALSH [email protected]

Archives

Can’t get in 10,000 steps a day? Even 4,000 has benefits
By VICTORIA BISSET - Washington Post

Achieving 10,000 steps per day is a common fitness goal, but there's a lack of scientific evidence that it's the ideal number for everyone.

Severe weather leads to unprecedented losses

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN Associated Press

Republican 2024 climate strategy: Less clean energy
Think tank’s ‘‘battle plan’’ part of effort to dramatically reshape the executive branch.

By LISA FRIEDMAN New York Times

When will we wake up and realize that "Global Warming" is not only REAL but it is HERE!, and It is affecting our lives. Think this summer has been bad? Just wait. If we don't start to make progress it will get worse . . . much worse.
Harv

Couple out $9M in crypto scheme
Scammer also encouraged Eden Prairie husband to abandon his wife.

By PAUL WALSH [email protected]