Free Republic

STOCKHOLM (AP) -- Climate change could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 by disrupting agriculture and fueling the spread of malaria and other diseases, the World Bank said in a report Sunday. Released just weeks ahead of a U.N. climate summit in Paris, the report highlighted how the impact of global warming is borne unevenly, with the world's poor woefully unprepared to deal with climate shocks such as rising seas or severe droughts.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government shutdown Oct. 1 could immediately suspend or delay food stamp payments to some of the 46 million Americans who receive the food aid. The Agriculture Department said Tuesday that it will stop providing benefits "within the first several days of October" if Congress does not pass legislation to keep government agencies open.

The mortgage crisis that brought the economy to its knees seven years ago was especially devastating for black communities, where homeowners who qualified for safe, traditional mortgages were often steered into ruinously priced loans that paid off handsomely for brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to foreclosure. The crisis left many middle-class minority communities strewn with abandoned houses, further widening the already huge wealth gap between African-Americans and whites. A study published this month in the journal Social Problems lays out how this happened in Baltimore in the run-up to the recession and comes at a time when the...

For 30 years, the federal government has helped millions of low-income Americans pay their phone bills, saying that telephone service is critical to summoning medical help, seeking work and, ultimately, climbing out of poverty. Now, the nation’s top communications regulator will propose offering those same people subsidized access to broadband Internet. On Thursday, that regulator, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, will circulate a plan to his fellow commissioners suggesting sweeping changes to a $1.7 billion subsidy program charged with ensuring that all Americans have affordable access to advanced telecommunications services, according to senior agency officials. The effort...

This is a breakup letter. But it's worse than that. This is a breakup letter by a junior high schooler who is trying to tell everyone in the hallway outside homeroom that the person they had liked a few days ago is just like kinda' totally awful or something. Some lib in The Inquisitr wrote:Elected in 2013, Pope Francis has since shown us a very convincing image of a bold, refreshing deviant who has adamantly defied the church’s typically iron-fisted conservatism. His stance on LGBT, women’s rights, atheism, and evolution were so mind-blowingly revolutionary that many people saw him as...

Free enterprise should be defended, not simply on the basis of statistics, but on the basis of morality, including the “moral imperative” to care for those in need through both job creation and charity. * * * Strain is dead right that foes of big government/national community must paint a clear and appealing picture of the local, non-governmental communities they want to take the place of the Leviathan nation-state.

... Houselander concludes that the usual “efforts at reform” in the Church are useless. “There are only two weapons against the worldly spirit which has possessed so many Catholics for so long,” and they are “Contemplation and visible, voluntary Poverty.” How prophetic, given that Rome now has a Pope Emeritus devoted to the former and a new Pope devoted to the latter. Pope Benedict voluntarily gave away his power to devote himself to a cloistered life of contemplation. And Pope Francis famously said after his election, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor.”

State argued that it is not required to subsidize organizations that advocate elective abortions AUSTIN, Texas — A federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that Texas can cut off funding for Planned Parenthood clinics that provide health services to low-income women before a trial over a new law that bans state money from going to organizations tied to abortion providers. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans lifted a federal judge's temporary injunction calling for the funding to continue pending an October trial on Planned Parenthood's challenge to the law. Texas officials sought to cut off funding...

As Ed Morrissey reported earlier, the Census Bureau today released its annual poverty report, which showed the number of poor Americans is up from 43.6 million last year to 46.2 million this year — roughly one in seven Americans and the highest poverty rate in 15 years. No matter which way you slice it, that’s not good news. When coupled with declining business and consumer confidence, it’s still worse news — a true sign of these troubled economic times. What policies we adopt to address our economic problems are of the utmost importance — and, unless we want to be...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.

The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking public comments this evening on environmental justice issues related to the agency's efforts to improve the New Orleans-area levee system to a 100-year level of protection. . . . The meeting will focus on potential effects that construction could have on racial minority and low-income populations.

Poverty is an important and emotional issue. Last year, the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States declaring that there were 37 million poor persons living in this country in 2005, roughly the same number as in the preceding years.[4] According to the Census report, 12.6 percent of Amer­icans were poor in 2005; this number has varied from 11.3 percent to 15.1 percent of the population over the past 20 years.[5]To understand poverty in America, it is important to look behind these numbers—to look at the actual living conditions of the individuals the government...

Imagine a line composed of every household with children in the United States, arranged from lowest to highest income. Now, divide the line into five equal parts. Which of the groups do you think enjoyed big increases in income since 1991? If you read the papers, you probably would assume that the bottom fifth did the worst. After all, income inequality in America is increasing, right? Wrong. According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from...

Friday, November 04, 2005 LE BLANC MESNIL, France — Small, mobile groups of freedom fighting French Insurgents hit Paris' riot-shaken suburbs with waves of arson attacks, torching hundreds of cars, as unrest entered its second week Friday and spread to other towns in France. Car torchings by freedom fighter Insurgents are a daily fact of life in France's tough suburbs, with thousands burned each month, police say. Police intelligence has recorded nearly 70,000 incidents of urban violence this year. The unrest has laid bare discontent simmering in suburbs and among immigrant families who feel trapped by poverty, unemployment, and poor...

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) - In Niger, a desert country twice the size of Texas, most of the 11 million people live on a dollar a day. Forty percent of children are underfed, and one out of four dies before turning 5. And that's when things are normal. Throw in a plague of locusts, and a familiar spectacle emerges: skeletal babies, distended bellies, people too famished to brush the flies from their faces. To the aid workers charged with saving the dying, the immediate challenge is to raise relief money and get supplies to the stricken areas. They leave it to...

Jeff Cohen suggest that an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week and an easy way to help alleviate global poverty is to buy your gasoline at Citgo stations. Cohen identifies Venezuela as one of the top oil producing countries in the world and the only one that is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The President of this utopia is Hugo Chavez, who Cohen says is "the Anti-Bush." Cohen urges you to buy your gasoline at Citgo, a U.S. refining and...

There are many kinds of anti-capitalism. The most militant variety, involving street protests and kicked-in windows, has subsided a little lately. But this was never the most important kind. A broader, milder, even cordial, discontent with capitalism saturates Western culture. It has become so familiar that it barely registers at the conscious level. But the feeling is there, and it creates the climate in which public policy is framed. Sipping a cup of Starbucks Fair Trade Blend -- the kind that guarantees growers a "living wage," while encouraging "equitable and sustainable development" (as opposed to the more normal kind of...

The last time the writer filled up with gas, it cost $2.05 per gallon. During a recent visit to Greece, gasoline costs were $4 per gallon and up, and low when compared to the rest of Europe. Assuming Greece and the rest of the world buy oil on the world market, everyone pays much the same price for crude. The difference at the pump is in overhead, transportation, refining, taxes, and profit. It is widely known that the U.S. has sufficient oil reserves to satisfy its needs for years, many years, even without the “strategic reserves.” But some of the...

It was a late Monday night last month in Husaybah, Iraq, and the usual handful of Marines had settled down in their brick and tin building around an Army green cot for what had become a near nightly diversion - a game of cards, spades, to be specific. --snip-- So far, 46 percent of the 798 Americans killed in the war as of May 26 have come from small towns outside of metropolitan areas, according to an analysis by the Post-Dispatch of military and U.S. Census statistics. For the analysis, "small towns" were defined as those of less than 40,000...

Lubbock Habitat for Humanity joins national King celebration By RAY GLASS AVALANCHE-JOURNAL Lubbock Habitat for Humanity will join a national effort to embrace cultural diversity, celebrate religious solidarity and honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. as it breaks ground today for its first "Building on a Dream" house. The 3 p.m. ceremony will be held on Dartmouth Street between North Vernon Avenue and North Avenue U in the Habitat community in North Lubbock. Jean Mallory, Lubbock Habitat church relations director, said construction of the house will begin after the group raises $40,000 and makes the final selection of...