Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.(AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen)
A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
Check out this link to see a whole slew of mainstream grocery items that are vegan. We’re talking Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter cereal, Cocoa Puffs, Bubbletape gum, Fritos, Laffy Taffy, Wheat Thins, Smucker’s Uncrustables, Lender’s Bagels, Ore-Ida French Fries, Healthy Choice Garden Veg. soup… mmm tasty and animal-free.
A year ago, sometime around now… Brutus was born by the train tracks on Broad St. downtown and when Halloween came I found him and took him home to be a spoiled little prince :)
WASHINGTON (AP) –The nation’s poverty rate rose to 12.7 percent of the population last year, the fourth consecutive annual increase, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The percentage of people without health insurance did not change.
Overall, there were 37 million people living in poverty, up 1.1 million people from 2003.
Asians were the only ethnic group to show a decline in poverty — from 11.8 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year. The poverty rate among the elderly declined as well, from 10.2 percent in 2003 to 9.8 percent last year.
The last decline in overall poverty was in 2000, when 31.1 million people lived under the threshold — 11.3 percent of the population.
The number of people without health insurance grew from 45 million to 45.8 million. At the same time, the number of people with health insurance coverage grew by 2 million last year.
Charles Nelson, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau, said the percentage of uninsured remained steady because of an ”increase in government coverage, notably Medicaid and the state children’s health insurance program, that offset a decline in employment-based coverage.”
The median household income, meanwhile, stood at $44,389, unchanged from 2003. Among racial and ethnic groups blacks had the lowest median income and Asians the highest. Median income refers to the point at which half of households earn more and half earn less.
Regionally, income declined only in the Midwest, down 2.8 percent to $44,657. The South was the poorest region and the Northeast and the West had the highest median incomes.
The increase in poverty came despite strong economic growth, which helped create 2.2 million jobs last year.
”I guess what happened last year was kind of similar to what happened in the early 1990s where you had a recession that was officially over and then you had several years after that of rising poverty,” Nelson said. ”… These numbers do reflect changes between 2003 and 2004. They don’t reflect any improvements in the economy in 2005.”
Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, said the poverty number is still much better than the 80s and early 90s.
”The good news is that poverty is a lot lower than it was in 1993, but we went through a hell of an economic boom,” Danziger said. ”Nobody is predicting we’re going to go through another economic boom like that.”
The poverty threshold differs by the size and makeup of a household. For instance, a family of four with two children was considered living in poverty if income was $19,157 or less. For a family of two with no children, it was $12,649. For a person 65 and over living alone, it was 9,060.
The estimates on poverty, uninsured and income are based on supplements to the bureau’s Current Population Survey, and are conducted over three months, beginning in February, at about 100,000 households nationwide.
The only city with a million or more residents that exhibited a significant change in poverty level last year was New York City, which saw the rate increase from 19 percent to 20.3 percent.
From EarthTimes.org:
Health food advocates who have been discouraging people from drinking coffee may have to rethink their diet philosophy. A recent study by researchers of the University of Scranton has provided evidence that coffee provides more oxidants to Americans than any other food or beverage.
Antioxidants are compounds of vitamins and minerals that neutralize the harmful effects of toxins that accumulate in the body and thus help cut the risk of heart disease, cancer and lesser diseases. They also prevent oxidation which destroys cells leading to faster wear and tear of the body and aging. Antioxidants thus make one’s body more immune to disease.
In the recently concluded study the researchers had measured and analyzed the antioxidant content in over 100 different food items – fruits, vegetables, nuts, beverages, etc. that commonly feature in the average American’s list of food items and beverages. The Scranton Univ. chemists had also tracked antioxidants hidden in sugar molecules, which were added to the antioxidant content of coffee.
The researchers then compared their findings to U.S. government data on food consumption. The comparison proved beyond doubt that coffee was the main source of antioxidants for Americans providing more antioxidants than any other food or beverage. Over 50 percent of Americans drink coffee every day and a very large percentage of these consume no less than three cups a day.
Coffee is, without a doubt, the most popular beverage in the country. Second on the list of popularity is black tea but it hardly compares to coffee which provides four times the antioxidants that tea does. The antioxidant data on coffee was then compared with figures provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to determine the per capita consumption on each food.
Among foods, the top three items were bananas, dry beans and corn. Extensive research on food items and beverages has earlier established that fruits such as red grapes, dates and cranberries and many vegetables provide high amounts of fiber and antioxidants. These food items aren’t very popular in the U.S. In any case, Americans are not eating enough fruits and vegetables and coffee could be compensating for the deficiency.
The chemists however cautioned that high levels of antioxidant do not necessarily mean a person consuming coffee gets the full benefit. A lot depends on the person’s metabolism, digestive system and how well it can break down the beverage into vitamins, minerals, trace elements and other nutrients. Medical science has yet to fully understand this process.
The study was partially funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute.
I will not clutter the web’s ether with another review of this movie, I’m sure it’s all been said more prolifically than anything I could ever write. Instead I’d rather shine some light on the soundtrack for the film.
The ending-credit song and the goosebumps it provoked is what made me immediately go out and buy it. The soundtrack as a whole is a great mix of instrumental and vocal.. and surprisingly it’s not as depressing as you’d expect. More thought provoking than depressing, I think.
My favorite is #3 “Million Voices” by Wyclef Jean. It opens with children singing “Ni dyar’izuba, rizagaruka hejuru yacu, ni nduzaricyeza” which translates to “when will the sun return above us, who will reveal it once again to us?” and it’s hauntingly beautiful. You can just picture the beautiful children standing together there singing it like it’s the last thing they can try to do. While I do like Wyclef, it’s really the children’s chorus and instrumentation that makes me put this song on repeat. #11 is also one of my favorites, “Ne me laisse pas seille ici” which is French for “don’t leave me here alone” I believe, though I’m a bit rusty at my French.
I definitely can’t get any of this movie or its music out of my head. I’m now attempting to significantly educate myself on Darfur so that I’m not just another person who disregards all feelings provoked by this film and doesn’t put them to any use… to once again quote one of my favorites by MLK, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” We were silent once before and look what happened. A truly civilized society would end that silence.
Wake up, television executives of America: Jon Stewart - the wiseacre host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show - knows more about your business than you do. Sure, The Daily Show may just seem like a smart comedy program on basic cable; nothing more than good political satire and a spot-on parody of TV news pieties. But it’s also a demonstration of television done right. In the six years since Stewart took over, the audience for The Daily Show has grown almost threefold to 1.4 million viewers a night. It boasts a legion of young, smart fans who are among the most demographically desirable audiences in the industry - further collapsing the caste distinctions between networks and cable. It has raised the bar for tie-ins, with a best-seller (America [The Book] has sold a stunning 2.5 million copies), a hit DVD (Indecision 2004), and - starting in October - a full-fledged spinoff (The Colbert Report). And The Daily Show may be the most popular TV program on the Internet.
Between blog links and BitTorrent downloads, hundreds of thousands of people watch clips online each day rather than on TV. In other words, in form if not in tone, Stewart’s Daily Show offers a glimpse of what all TV may one day become: something we can consume in many distillations, at a time, place, and device of our choosing.
Stewart likes to protest that he doesn’t pay any mind to this. All he and his crew do, he says, “is try and put out a funny, well-written show about current events.” But push a bit and he shows himself to be a savvy observer and critic of his industry. Not entirely surprising: He’s spent 15 years in cable and syndicated television, a stint that includes three failed MTV projects. And his scorching critique of television on CNN’s Crossfire last fall was so dead-on that the network’s president cited Stewart’s indictment when he canceled the show in January. Wired sat down with Stewart and Ben Karlin - The Daily Show’s executive producer, Stewart’s partner at Busboy Productions, and a guy who can finish Stewart’s sentences - for a conversation about television: where it might go, and whether Stewart will get there first.
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