For many Americans, collecting disability has become a career, said Michael Barone. Over the past 50 years, the number of people receiving benefits from the Social Security disability program created to help Americans who are too sick to work—has rocketed from 455,000 to 8.6 million. An incredible 5.6 percent of adults are now getting disability checks, with a cost to […]
Read more
What’s the most forbidden topic in America? asked Timothy Egan. It’s not sex or religion. It’s gun violence. We are “the most armed society in the world,” with more than 300 million guns in private hands, and 9,146 gun homicides in 2009—a rate nearly 20 times higher than that of other supposedly civilized countries. “But don’t bring that up.” Sports […]
Read more
■ Having been banned from every tanning salon in New Jersey, Patricia Krentcil — dubbed “a tanorexic” by the tabloids—plans to move to Britain to continue tanning. Krentcil, 44, says that since salons started turning her away she is having “to spend hours covering myself in tanning lotion to get the color I want.” She says that even though she’s […]
Read more
A major new study shows more American children than ever are struggling with myopia, or near-sightedness. A problem pediatric ophthalmologist Dr. Phoebe Lenhart at the Emory Eye Center says they typically see in adults, but not kids. “Myopia or near-sightedness is a condition where you can see things clearly up close but you have trouble seeing at a distance,” says […]
Read more
Eddyville, Ky A prison doctor and two other staffers at the Kentucky State Penitentiary have been fired after a mentally disturbed inmate starved himself to death. James Kenneth Embry, 57, who had three years left on a nine-year drug sentence, was found dead in his cell in Eddyville in January. Embry started behaving erratically last spring when he stopped taking […]
Read more
■ A Good Samaritan from Macomb County, Mich., saved a baby’s life in a dramatic roadside rescue. Ryan Cornelissen, 21, was flagged down in his car by a man whose wife had just given birth on the way to the hospital. The man did not speak English well, but Cornelissen quickly saw that the baby wasn’t breathing. He dialed 911, […]
Read more
Can Best By dates be trusted on meats and fish? Do you think your local supermarket is practicing truthful Best By dates on that packaged meat, chicken, or fish? Your guess could be quite wrong!! Investigators found that almost every supermarket they researched was in some way fiddling with the Best By dates on packaged meats and fish. What they […]
Read more
A notice appeared in the paper recently with the names and faces of eight men who have a combined wealth of $426 billion. According to Oxfam International, in 2015 this would have equaled the amount of wealth held by half the world’s population, the poorest half. Oxfam International is a confederation of charitable organizations in 90 countries seeking to stop the injustices that […]
Read more
A Mediterranean diet could be the answer to keeping depression at bay as well as heart disease, suggests new research. The study, which monitored over 15k people, showed that a diet filled with fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts and olive oil, along with low levels of processed meats, could prevent the onset of depression. Researchers, whose findings were published in the […]
Read more
Public urination is a problem in most major cities of the world, but now another town is using technology to “pee back” the perpetrators, so to speak. Authorities in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, had the walls in this well-known red light district sprayed with a super-hydrophobic nano-coating which is so water repellent that, as tech website gizmag.com […]
Read more