Dutch fund PFZW reduces BlackRock ties over clash on sustainability

Link: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/dutch-fund-pfzw-reduces-blackrock-ties-over-clash-sustainability-2025-09-03/

Excerpt:

Dutch pension fund PFZW has stopped investing in stock funds managed by BlackRock (BLK.N), opens new tab, in part because of concerns over the U.S. firm’s voting record on sustainability issues, its lead asset manager PGGM said on Wednesday.

The move comes amid a wider activist campaign in the Netherlands to push the country’s large pension schemes to drop managers that have reduced support for climate change-linked resolutions at company meetings.

While some companies have scaled back the importance they attach to sustainability since the re-election of U.S. President Donald Trump, many of the biggest Dutch pension funds still consider it the best long-term approach.

….

In June, U.S. asset owner the Sierra Club Foundation said it would move $10.5 million in assets because BlackRock had not pressed portfolio companies enough on climate.

In response to the PFZW move, a BlackRock spokesperson said: “BlackRock clients – including our Dutch clients – continue to invest through BlackRock to meet their sustainable investing goals, entrusting us to manage over $1 trillion in sustainable and transition assets on their behalf.”

Author(s): Bart H. Meijer and Simon Jessop

Publication Date: 3 Sept 2025

Publication Site: Reuters

What Does It Take to Get Men to See a Doctor?

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/magazine/mens-health-doctor-masculinity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kE8.Wnox.7wL-3zvQ9-5r&smid=url-share

Excerpt:

Right now, men in the United States, whether infants or elders, are more likely to die at younger ages than their female counterparts. Male life expectancy at birth is currently 75.8 years — 5.3 years less than it is for women. The gap between American men and women had mostly been narrowing gradually for the first decade of this century, then holding relatively steady, until the Covid-19 pandemic, when it widened sharply to 5.8 years, the largest difference since 1996. While living longer doesn’t guarantee that those extra years are healthy or meaningful, life expectancy remains a rough proxy for overall health.

Over the past several years, men have died at higher rates than women from 14 of the top 15 causes of death. The only exception has been Alzheimer’s disease — and that, at least to some extent, is because more women live long enough to develop it. Young men in particular are heavily affected by deaths of despair, like suicides and overdoses, which significantly lower overall male life expectancy. Native American and Black men have the shortest lives; across all racial groups, men die younger than women.

That disparity has many causes, one of which is that men simply don’t go to the doctor as often. The problem begins early: After pediatric care, young men largely disappear from medical settings until after serious issues arise. Women tend to see their gynecologists regularly; men have no clear equivalent. The Affordable Care Act covers only one preventive service specifically targeting men, while it lists 27 for women (some of which are related to pregnancy). HPV vaccination, for example, recommended for all adolescents, still feels mostly associated with girls, when HPV-related throat cancers are now more common in men than cervical cancers are in women.

….

By the time the man came into the E.R. where I work, the cancer had already spread throughout his body. He knew that colon cancer ran in his family, yet he didn’t get his first colonoscopy until almost a decade past the recommended time — until he decided he could no longer ignore the blood he had been seeing in his stool for a year. Work occupied his mind; besides, nothing really felt like something he couldn’t push through. After his diagnosis, surgery and chemotherapy temporarily suppressed the disease. He felt better, so he stopped seeing his doctors.

….

Around the world, in countries where precarious manhood is felt more strongly, men tend to have higher rates of risky health behaviors and lower life expectancy. Where these beliefs are strongest among the 60-plus countries surveyed, male life expectancy is about 6.7 years shorter than in countries where they are weakest — even after controlling for wealth, gender equality and number of physicians. The United States ranks higher in precarious manhood beliefs than its peers like Spain, Germany and Finland; correspondingly, American men die younger. In a forthcoming paper, researchers including Bosson and Vandello found that the more strongly a country endorses precarious manhood, the more likely its men are to die from high-risk causes — drownings, accidents, homicides — and moderate-risk causes like lung cancer from smoking.

….

American men aren’t the only ones dying younger; the life-expectancy gap between men and women exists everywhere in the world. But what is different is that other countries have done much more on a national level to try to make progress in improving men’s health. A handful, including Ireland, Australia and Brazil, have developed national men’s health policies. Since Ireland introduced its strategy in 2008 — the world’s first — it has made considerable strides in male life expectancy, outpacing most European nations. One advance the country has made is at workplaces, getting employers in male-dominated industries, like farming and construction, on board with prioritizing men’s health. “When we started this 20 years ago, we were met with a lot of resistance,” Noel Richardson, a key architect of Ireland’s men’s health plan, told me. “There’s been quite a sea change. There’s a mainstreaming and a normalizing of health for men as something we should all aspire to.”

Author(s): By Helen Ouyang
Helen Ouyang is a physician and contributing writer for the magazine.

Publication Date: 25 Aug 2025

Publication Site: NYT Magazine

Real Strains Inside the BLS Made It Vulnerable to Trump’s Accusations

Link: https://www.wsj.com/economy/real-strains-inside-the-bls-made-it-vulnerable-to-trumps-accusations-52857f36?st=J4tV7k&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Graphic:

Excerpt:

At the end of each month, the BLS uses the data it has on hand to make a first estimate. Then it updates that estimate in each of the following two months, based on late replies and a revised seasonal adjustment.

If the employers replying late happen to give different information from the first batch, as happened this summer, big revisions are likely. For example, Friday’s data showed that in May and June, there were about 109,000 fewer jobs for educators at state and local governments than previously thought. Late-responding schools were responsible for the bulk of that revision, said Omair Sharif, founder of analytics firm Inflation Insights.

“The decline in response rates for the initial release, that’s just going to make the range of revisions larger,” said Jonathan Pingle, an economist at UBS. “They’re getting a significantly larger amount of incremental information after the initial deadline.”

A year ago, when he was running for his second term, Trump was enraged by a different BLS revisions process—a twice-a-year benchmarking that reconciles the monthly figures with a comprehensive set of state-level data that, in theory, includes just about every employer in the country. Using this bigger data set gives the BLS a direct look at the number of companies that have been founded and have gone out of business, a blind spot in the bureau’s month-to-month data.

Author(s): Matt Grossman

Publication Date: 4 Aug 2025

Publication Site: WSJ

Geographic Distribution of Tickborne Disease Cases

Link: https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/data-research/facts-stats/geographic-distribution-of-tickborne-disease-cases.html

Graphic:

Notes:

Dashboard data files

Notes on tickborne disease surveillance data:

  • Cases are reported from the patient’s county of residence, not necessarily the place where they were infected by or exposed to ticks. Cases are not included in this list if county of residence was not reported.
  • Many high incidence states have modified surveillance practices that have led to notable decreases in case counts over time. Consequently, these data may not accurately represent disease trends in those areas.
  • Not all diseases are reportable from every jurisdiction in every year. For more information, see Annual Statistics from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) or contact your local health department.

Reported Tickborne Disease Cases by County of Residence 2019-2022.xlsx

To download a static map for the most recent years of data, click here.

Publication Date: accessed 1 Aug 2025

Publication Site: CDC