• Identity theft
• Imposter scams (caller claims to be someone else and asks for money)
• Debt collection (be wary of telephone solicitations)
• Mail theft
• Bogus employment questionnaire (caller responds to employment inquiry, asking for personal data)
• Investment fraud (often coupled with a free lunch offer)
• Online fraud (e.g. a bogus alert appears, telling the user to click on an important fix)
• Online technical support (user is told of a problem on their computer; the caller asks for permission to remotely control their computer) 

• Don't make decisions when in a state of heightened anxiety.
• Don't fall for offers of phantom payouts.
• Be careful about giving out personal information that could be used for identity theft.
• Don't fall for sales pitches that there are only a few remaining items.
• Intimidation is often used to compel a reluctant person (just hang up).
• Protect your social security number.
• Monitor your accounts and credit reports.
• Use the Fraud Watch Network to identify ongoing types of fraud in your region at:

Right up there with heart disease and cancer, falls are one of the biggest health risks we face as we age. And the risk goes up as birthdays accrue.

 

About a third of people over age 65 fall every year. By age 80, the risk rises to half the population. Once a person is injured in a fall, they're more likely to fall again. Of people over 65 admitted to hospitals for fall-related injuries, 25% die within a year.

 

With odds like that, there are steps we can take to protect ourselves. Simone Carter of the Legacy Trauma Nurses Talk Tough program gave this advice in a recent public presentation:

 

The Empire of Cotton - A Global History

 

This book won the prestigious Bancroft Prize.

 

Sven Beckert, a global historian at Harvard University, considers in lively prose the growing of cotton and textile production from the Bronze Age to the period following the American Civil War. For the United States, slave labor in the South - cheaper, more controllable, and more expendable than paid workers - supported Southern plantation wealth. Overlooked was the fact that cotton produced by slave labor fed the textile mills of the North, serving as a basis for the emergence of industrial capitalism and great wealth in the North.

 

Globally, US cotton production fed the textile mills of industrialized Britain as it too shifted from mercantilism. When its textile manufacturing was curtailed by an embargo of the South during the American Civil War, imperial Britain crushed local cotton growing and weaving in much of China and India by taking land and forcing local labor to grow cotton for British textile mills.

 

Beckert shows how the empire of cotton emerged from a complex of factors -  technological changes, the decimation of Amerindians, land grabs by European peoples globally, and the replacement of mercantile capitalism by industrial capitalism ("war capitalism," Beckert calls it).  What he rescues for global history is the intertwining impact of US slavery, colonialism and imperialism and the American Civil War on the global economy. These experiences are now part of the bureaucratized state in the U.S.

 

 - Nona Glazer