Paul Feldman

President and CEO of Pan-American Life Insurance Group José Suquet said that starting his career as an agent with the company “was the best decision I could have ever made.”

MassMutual’s Paul LaPiana on blending career and independent channels while staying true to core offerings.

Deanna Strable rose from actuarial intern to CEO of Principal Financial Group. Now she’s leading the 145-year-old company into a new era of retirement, benefits and technology-driven growth.

In a closely watched election contest, San Francisco voters have upheld a first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products, overwhelmingly rejecting an $11.6 million campaign by R.J. Reynolds to scuttle the law. San Francisco officials last June approved the ban but a petition drive funded by Reynolds, the maker of the top-selling menthol brand, Newport, forced the issue onto yesterday’s ballot. With all precincts counted, the ban — known as Proposition E – won by a whopping 68 percent-to-32 . . .

Posted with permission from Fairwarning.org: Farmers in California, the nation’s top agricultural state, are applying near-record levels of pesticides despite the rising popularity of organic produce and concerns about the health of farmworkers and rural schoolchildren. The latest figures, released in April by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and covering 2016, show that 209 million pounds of pesticide active ingredients were used in agriculture. That was down 1.4 percent from the year before, but still the third-highest yearly total since the state began reporting the . . .

Posted with permission from Fairwarning.org: Dicamba, an herbicide sold by agribusiness giants Monsanto, BASF and DowDupont, doesn’t just kill weeds. Last year, according to a University of Missouri survey, dicamba damaged an estimated 3.6 million acres of soybeans across 25 states when it drifted from farms planted with seeds genetically engineered to resist the chemical onto regular soybean fields. That heavy toll on soybeans has pitted farmer against farmer. In 2016, dicamba even figured in a dispute that led to the murder of an Arkansas farmer who had accused . . .

Posted with permission from Fairwarning.org: The increasing use of smartphones and recreational marijuana may be contributing to a surge in the numbers of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes, according to a new analysis. The report by the Governors Highway Safety Association estimates that pedestrian fatalities totaled about 6,000 in 2017, roughly the same as the year before, when the official count was 5,987. Those figures are considerably higher than in recent years. “Two consecutive years of 6,000 pedestrian deaths is a red flag for all of us . . .

As the nation’s fleet of small recreational and commercial drones keeps soaring — the government projects nearly 3 million will be in the skies by 2022 — safety concerns are rising even as federal enforcement stalls. The Federal Aviation Administration has collected 6,117 reports of potentially unsafe use of drones from February, 2014 through April of this year, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

The victims include a Bible college student in Iowa who was bicycling home from work, a 13-year-old Michigan boy riding in his older sister’s car and a Minnesota school bus driver picking up the morning newspaper in front of his home. All were killed in recent years by distracted drivers who had been texting or looking at their GPS. Yet none of the drivers responsible for those deaths spent more than a few days behind bars.