May, 2008

The number of uninsured U.S. young adults, who already represent a major chunk of the American population without health coverage, rose again in 2006, according to a study released on Friday. Based on census data, 13.7 million people aged 19 to 29 had no health insurance, either public or private, in 2006, up from 13.3 million in 2005, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that researches health policy.

Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007 at the highest rate on record, and the toll is climbing ever higher this year as long war deployments stretch on. At least 115 soldiers killed themselves last year, up from 102 the previous year, the Army said yesterday. "We see a lot of things that are going on in the war which do contribute - mainly the longtime and multiple deployments away from home, exposure to really terrifying and horrifying things, the easy availability of loaded weapons, and a force that's very, very busy right now," said Colonel Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general.

Soaring world food prices may dip in coming months, but steadily rising demand means higher food costs are probably here to stay over the coming decade. That could fuel growing hunger and unrest in the world's poorest and most vulnerable nations, a United Nations agency reported Thursday. In one of the strongest statements yet of the potential scale and impact of the world food price crunch, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said there is ample reason to believe that "permanent factors" and not just inclement weather are behind the current rise in prices and that those will keep food costs at "higher average levels than in the past."

The Bush administration, bowing to a court order, has released a fresh summary of federal and independent research pointing to large, and mainly harmful, impact of human-caused global warming in the United States. The report included new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming. Among the report’s new conclusions on health: “An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk.

For the first time since the presidential election of 1988, the observant white Catholic vote might be up for grabs this November. Conservative Catholics now appear to be more concerned about the economy and the war in Iraq, and less motivated by abortion, the issue that has long kept the voting bloc aligned with Republicans. The shift may be bad news for Sen. John McCain, but it also poses a challenge for Sen. Barack Obama in some critical swing states where a majority of Catholic voters supported Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Since the 1970s, the country's roughly 64 million Catholics have generally voted in line with the nation. Still, some distinct segments of Catholics can swing an election.

"We're great on supporting unions when they are in commercial operations. We're not so great when they're in our own institutions," said Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan May 23. The retired auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y., was the closing speaker at the 24th Catholic Healthcare Administrative Personnel program held May 19-23 at St. John's University in New York with joint sponsorship by St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers. Fifty administrators and pastoral care professionals from dioceses across the United States participated.

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose slightly more than expected last week, while the tally of those remaining on the benefit rolls hit its highest mark in more than four years, the government said on Thursday. Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits climbed to 372,000 in the week ended May 24 from an upwardly revised 368,000 for the prior week, the Labor Department said.

Just as it has claimed so many other members of the military, the war in Iraq has taken a toll on chaplains. Although they do not engage in combat, chaplains face the perils of war as they move around Iraq to visit troops. None have been killed, but some have been wounded. Many report post-traumatic stress disorder and other stress problems. In the past year, the Army has begun to recognize those problems among chaplains and is ensuring that those suffering from stress disorders receive medical treatment at military hospitals.

The United States is shirking its duty to provide the world with moral leadership and China is letting its business interests trump human rights concerns in Myanmar and Sudan, a human rights group said Wednesday. Amnesty International's annual report on the state of the world's human rights accused the U.S. of failing to provide a moral compass for its international peers, a long-standing complaint the London-based group has against the North American superpower. This year it also criticized the U.S. for supporting Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last November when he imposed a state of emergency, clamped down on the media and sacked judges.

More than 100 countries reached agreement yesterday to ban cluster bombs - weapons that human-rights groups deplore but that the United States, which did not join the ban, calls an integral, legitimate part of its arsenal. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose personal intervention yesterday led to final agreement among representatives of 111 countries gathered in Dublin, called the ban a "big step forward to make the world a safer place." The Convention on Cluster Munitions, as approved in Dublin, calls on signatories to stop producing and using cluster bombs and to destroy all stockpiles within eight years.

Are religion and faith playing an appropriate role – or an inappropriate one – in the 2008 presidential campaign? So far, it's some of both, say those who've been monitoring the campaign. There's no arguing that religious speech is more prominent than ever this election season. That's in part because Democratic candidates, traditionally reluctant to discuss religious views out of privacy concerns, have warmed to the topic in recognition that many voters want an understanding of how a president's religious convictions might influence him or her in office. Whether this focus on candidates' religious views is helpful or detrimental depends, say political observers, on how the political parties, faith groups, and the news media handle faith issues in coming months.

By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since Katrina struck in 2005. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year, Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Avenue at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists. Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.

The number of U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) jumped nearly 50 percent in 2007 over the previous year, as more of them served lengthy and repeated combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon data released yesterday show. The increase brings the total number of U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with PTSD after serving in one of the two conflicts from 2003 to 2007 to nearly 40,000.

Climate change is increasing the risk of U.S. crop failures, depleting the nation's water resources and contributing to outbreaks of invasive species and insects, the Department of Agriculture said in a report released Tuesday. Those and other problems for the U.S. livestock and forestry industries will persist for at least the next 25 to 50 years, said the report compiled by 38 scientists for use by water and land managers. "I think what's really eye-opening is the depth and breadth of the impacts and consequences going on right now," said Anthony C. Janetos, a study author and director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute at the University of Maryland.

In a rare show of bipartisan unity, the three presidential candidates lent their names to a statement and newspaper ad Wednesday accusing the Sudanese government of genocide in the Darfur region and urging an end to the violence. Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined with Republican nominee-in-waiting John McCain in signing the ad in The New York Times headlined "GENOCIDE." "We stand united and demand that the genocide and violence in Darfur be brought to an end," says the ad.

Christian and Jewish religious leaders formally threw their support behind a reworked U.S. Senate bill that addresses environmental climate change. During a media briefing on Capitol Hill, Bishop Thomas G. Wenski -- chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace -- joined bill co-sponsors Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., and John W. Warner, R-Va., and other Christian and Jewish religious leaders to discuss what he called "ground-breaking legislation" that also takes the poor into consideration when combating global warming.

There is a growing number of "nontraditional" food pantry clients across the country. They include more formerly independent senior citizens, more people who own houses and more people who used to call themselves "middle-class" — those who are not used to fretting over the price of milk. To meet growing demand, America's Second Harvest-The Nation's Food Bank Network, pressed lawmakers for the past year to increase the annual level of funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program, commonly know as TEFAP, from $140 million to $250 million annually.

Scores of corruption cases in recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security Department just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem the flow of illegal immigration. Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement, driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has grown so worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for smuggling organizations.

At a time when food prices are soaring, a growing number of Americans are struggling financially and local social service agencies are seeing record numbers of applicants, advocates are concerned that the purchasing power of food stamps has shrunk since 1996, when Congress recalculated benefit levels. The result slowed the value of food stamps relative to inflation. If benefits had kept pace with inflation over 12 years, a family with one working parent and two children would be receiving an additional $37 a month, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington-based think tank.

Several leading child welfare groups urged an overhaul of federal laws dealing with transracial adoption today, arguing that African-American children in foster care are ill-served by a "colorblind" approach meant to encourage their adoption by white families. Recommendations for major changes in the policy were outlined in a report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. "Color consciousness - not 'color blindness' - should help to shape policy development," the report said.

Sister Kathy Thill of Waterloo, Iowa said she feels like a stranger in her own country in the wake of a May 12 immigration raid in tiny Postville. The Catholic nun has assisted immigrant families there following the detainment of 389 workers at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant. She is a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas who works with Latino families in Iowa. "I am also a United States citizen who grew up believing that this is a democratic country in which the dignity of all people is respected and their rights protected," she said Tuesday at a news conference here, surrounded by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. "This is not the country I experienced this past week."

Sen. John McCain on Thursday repudiated the presidential endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee after learning about a sermon in which the megachurch pastor from San Antonio declared that God allowed the rise of Adolf Hitler because it resulted in returning Israel to the Jewish people. The Arizona Republican's decision to distance himself from Hagee came after months of mounting criticism, particularly from Roman Catholics, over his acceptance of Hagee's endorsement in late February. Hagee has called the Catholic Church a "false religious system" and a "false cult system" and has suggested that the church played a role in the Holocaust.

Not long ago, if the words religion and voting came together in the same sentence, chances are the topic was a certain kind of religious voter: a Protestant evangelical or conservative Catholic driven to political activism by opposition to legal abortion and qualms about homosexuality. The days of the easy label may be over. In this election season, the religious right, the umbrella term long applied to that predictable religious Republican voter, once ubiquitous on the airwaves and in print, has seemingly vanished from the scene. The two hot-button issues that have dominated so much of U.S. politics in recent years have likewise receded, giving ground to such other issues more readily associated with a liberal agenda: war, poverty, the environment and human rights.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Myanmar's junta agreed Friday to allow all aid workers into the country after weeks of refusing access to foreign relief experts seeking to help cyclone survivors. Ban said the government also agreed to let in aid "via civilian ships and small boats," wording suggesting that U.S., British and French warships waiting off Myanmar's coast with relief supplies would not be allowed to dock. Myanmar's military government did not immediately confirm the agreement and there was no indication how quickly it would be take effect.

Democrat Barack Obama explained the roots of his unusual name, listed some of his Jewish friends and voiced support for Israel on Thursday during a synagogue visit designed to shore up Jewish support for his U.S. presidential bid. Obama, an Illinois senator and the front-runner for his party's White House nomination, has battled concerns among some Jewish Americans about his race, religion and views on Israel. Obama addressed those issues in a nearly two-hour meeting with Democrats and Republicans at a Jewish temple in Florida, a state that will be key to winning November's general election.