Living Today: Issues of modern living

ADOPT-A-SCHOOL BUS

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman is announcing a new clean air program to retrofit or replace high-polluting school busses.

The national program is modeled after a North Texas initiative, where Edwin Cabaniss volunteered to get local businesses to help retire old school buses.

"Every day in America, 24 million children travel to and from school on one of 444,000 busses, and we are poised to make the bus ride cleaner for those children," Whitman says.

In North Texas companies adopting a school bus for a "green" level sponsorship of $25,000 can have their logo prominently displayed on the new or retrofitted busses.

DEPRESSION AND TOXINS LINKED

Depression is a growing problem affecting more than 17 million people in America. The University Pathology Consortium, an academic group founded by six universities, thinks some symptoms of depression may be due to exposure to toxins.

Repeated exposure to pollutants in the food and environment can result in accumulation of toxins such as lead, mercury and aluminum inside the body.

One possible source of exposure is dental fillings made from amalgam, which contains mercury. Norwegian researchers found 47 percent of patients with dental amalgam fillings reported suffering from major depression, compared to 14 percent in the control group.

"Environmental toxins have increased in the past 50 years and have been found in everything from grit to the makeup," Dr. Harry Wong, clinical director of the Physicians Plus Medical Group in the San Francisco, says in a statement.

PASSENGER JETS BUILT ELSEWHERE

University of Buffalo researchers say 10 years from now the United States will lose the industry of building passenger aircraft for export.

Passenger aircraft is the single most important sector of the U.S. economy in terms of skilled production jobs, value added and exports, says the report, published in Futures.

The dramatic shift in the geography of aircraft production overseas to Airbus and other government-financed firms in Japan, Italy and China is a result of subcontracting.

Foreign governments require that in planes they purchase, key technologies for aircraft production must be transferred to their companies from the United States or a certain percentage of the planes they buy must contain locally produced parts.

DELIVERIES IN THE LOBBY

With the war in Iraq smoldering and the terror alert still high, many apartment buildings in New York City have opted to ban the delivery of food, packages and newspapers from beyond the lobby.

The centralization of commercial activity has transformed the lobby into a new kind of village square, where upstairs, often in bedroom slippers, mingles with downstairs, usually in uniform, The New York Times reports.

Meanwhile, delivery people bearing dry cleaning, restaurant food, diapers, prescriptions, melting ice cream and flowers, cool their heels in the lobby.

Each building is sort of a gated community looking to protect itself, according to one tenant.