Somalia now has the world’s highest  mortality rate for children under the age of five, according to new data  released by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.

“Somalia’s child mortality rate in 2010, stood at 180 deaths per 1,000 live births which now ranks worst in the world,” the United Nations Children’s Fund said in a media statement.

Scott Eells/Bloomberg News, left; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The investor Warren E. Buffett, left, inspired the name of President Obama’s proposal.

By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will call for a new minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year to ensure that they pay at least the same percentage of their earnings as middle-income taxpayers, according to administration officials.

With a special joint Congressional committee starting work to reach a bipartisan budget deal by late November, the proposal adds a new and populist feature to Mr. Obama’s effort to raise the political pressure on Republicans to agree to higher revenues from the wealthy in return for Democrats’ support of future cuts from Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. Obama, in a bit of political salesmanship, will call his proposal the “Buffett Rule,” in a reference to Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained repeatedly that the richest Americans generally pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than do middle-income workers, because investment gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages.

Mr. Obama will not specify a rate or other details, and it is unclear how much revenue his plan would raise. But his idea of a millionaires’ minimum tax will be prominent in the broad plan for long-term deficit reduction that he will outline at the White House on Monday.

In a recently published article in the journal PLoS One, researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory claim to have developed a new drug that has the potential to cure nearly all types of viral infections ranging from the common cold to highly deadly hemorrhagic fevers.

The new drug, known as DRACO (double-stranded RNA activated caspase oligomerizer), is able to discriminate between healthy cells and those infected by viruses. It essentially signals the infected cells to die, preventing the virus from replicating and moving into other cells, all while leaving adjacent healthy cells completely unaffected. Furthermore, scientists believe that it would be difficult for viruses to develop a resistance to this kind of treatment.

The researchers involved in the project have already tested this drug on mice who have been infected with lethal amounts of influenza and found that the mice were completely cured as a result. They hope to test this drug against several other types of viruses in mice before moving on to human trials in the future.

There’s a dirty secret in your glass of orange juice. Even though it says “not from concentrate,” it probably sat in a large vat for up to year with all the oxygen was removed from it. This allows it to be preserved and dispensed all year-round. Taking out all the O2 also gets rid of all the flavor. So the juice makers have to add the flavors back in using preformulated recipes full of chemicals called “flavor packs.” Mmm, delicious, fresh-squeezed ethyl-butyrate!

Author Aliissa Hamilton covers this in her book, “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice.” Of her findings, she writes on the Civl Eats blog:

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Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren’t listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor.

”

Less you think this is some kind of organic hippy conspiracy theory, deaeration and pasteurization are very real in the orange juice and they do remove flavor. Here is a study to that effect posted on the USDA.gov site.

If this is the type of thing that bothers you, buying OJ from the store in May through June is the only way to ensure that most of the juice is from fresh Valencia oranges. The rest of the year it’s reflavored sugar water from a tank farm.