Alan Rappeport:

General Mills hit out at ethanol subsidies as a driver of rising food prices in the US, arguing that they needlessly fuel inflation.

“We’re driving up food prices unnecessarily,” Ken Powell, chief executive of General Mills, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If corn prices go up, wheat goes up. It’s all linked.”

General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereal, Progresso soup and Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, is the world’s sixth-largest food company by revenues. It said last month that it expects its input costs to increase up to 11 per cent next year as it lowered its earnings forecast on inflation fears.

John Gravois:

One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation’s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering “practice and training in the art of public speaking” along with “sociability and good fellowship” since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city’s sprawling six-lane boulevards—past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme’s “Ramadan Dozen” special—to reach the campus of a local women’s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi—a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee—harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.

Steve Lohr:

The administration’s initiative takes on particular significance because this year is when the government begins spending billions of dollars to accelerate the adoption of computerized patient records.
The incentive payments, typically as much as $44,000 a physician, begin this year. But those payments require doctors to make “meaningful use” of “certified” electronic health records. The payments are staggered over five years, and to get the money physicians must use the technology for increasingly extensive record-keeping and reporting. The administration has not said whether a usability standard will be in the next stage of requirements, due by early next year.

The government says it is committed to working with technology companies, medical professionals and academics, to adopt the best approach. Yet common ground has been elusive so far.

At a meeting last month at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., Janet Campbell, a software developer at Epic Systems, a supplier of electronic health records, expressed the industry’s concerns. Doctors are discriminating consumers, she said, and companies like hers work on improving their products in the marketplace every day.

the Government should NOT be using our tax dollars to subsidize health care automation. This approach never works.