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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

678691

Roger Bybee's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/rogerdbybee
Bio: I've recently been invited  to write a twice-weekly blog in In These Times, appearing Tuesdays and Thursdays (go to www.inthesetimes.com and flick the In These Times Working link at the top of... (More)

All Bybee Blogs

Health insurers' tobacco addication

By Roger Bybee at Jul 06, 2009


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Health insurers still remain

Addicted to tobacco stock

 

Harvard researchers, in a new study, have discovered that life and health insurance companies are still major investors in tobacco stocks, just as they were when an earlier study was issued more than a decade ago. Physicians for National called upon the insurers to divest. "The insurance industry has yet to kick the habit," a PNHP spokesperson said.

The new article on insurance company investments, published in the June 4 New England Journal of Medicine, documents that U.S., Canadian and U.K.-based insurance firms hold at least $4.4 billion of investments in companies whose subsidiaries produce cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco and related products.

According to the World Health Organization, tobacco products currently contribute to the deaths of about 5.4 million people worldwide annually.  Tobacco use heightens the risk of stroke, heart attack, lung disease and cancer.

“Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people’s health,” said Dr. J. Wesley Boyd, the lead author of the article. “It’s clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people’s well-being.”

For example, Sun Life Financial Inc., based in Toronto, sells life, health, disability and long-term care insurance. Yet it also owns slightly over $1 billion in stock in two tobacco companies, including $890 million in Philip Morris.


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