18 April 2019 (Gallup) – Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles — feelings and emotions — that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture. Each index provides a real-time snapshot of people’s daily experiences, offering leaders insights into the health of their societies that they cannot gather from […]
29 April 2019 (The Weather Channel) – Hurricane Michael ripped through the Southeast U.S. six months ago. The damage at the coast was unreal, but inland, another astounding loss: pecan, timber and row crops. While row crops can be planted again this year, it’ll be a decade before farmers can grow pecans and earn an […]
By Bianca Padró Ocasio29 March 2019 (Orlando Sentinel) – Luis Angel Santos Baez was rummaging in his apartment complex’s dumpster in the early days of January 2018 when he found what seemed like a gift from God: a plastic storage cart that held several bags filled with unused notebooks and other arts-and-crafts supplies. Santos Baez, […]
By Zoya Teirstein24 April 2019 (Grist) – In the 1980s, NASA scientist James Hansen brought climate change to the attention of Congress, and shortly thereafter the public. Humans, he testified in 1988, were responsible for rising global temperatures. But the man who put his reputation on the line to alert the world to the dangers of […]
2 May 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – Everybody knows the “American Dream” of upward class mobility is a shining artifact of the past, to borrow the words of Leonard Cohen. But how fast is the dream dying? Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights project seeks to answer this question and hopes to prescribe remedies. They’ve collected a great […]
By Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Gareth Jones1 May 2019 JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Anti-Semitic attacks worldwide rose 13 percent in 2018 from the previous year, with the highest number of incidents reported in major Western democracies including the United States, France, Britain and Germany, an annual study showed on Wednesday. Those incidents included […]
By Lena H. Sun 25 April 2019 (The Washington Post) – Measles cases in the United States have now exceeded the highest number on record in a single year since the disease was eliminated in 2000. Nationwide, 695 cases of the vaccine-preventable illness had been reported in 22 states this year, as of 3 p.m. Wednesday […]
By Helen Adams 26 April 2019 (MUSC) – Psychologists from the Medical University of South Carolina have just published one of the largest post-disaster screening projects in U.S. history. The report, available online through JAMA Network Open, measured the magnitude of Hurricane Maria’s impact on the mental health of children in Puerto Rico. Rosaura Orengo-Aguayo, an assistant […]
By Julie Ray 25 April 2019 WASHINGTON, D.C. (Gallup) – Even as their economy roared, more Americans were stressed, angry, and worried last year than they have been at most points during the past decade. Asked about their feelings the previous day, the majority of Americans (55%) in 2018 said they had experienced stress during […]
By Bob Bryan22 March 2019 (Business Insider) – The US posted a record budget deficit in the month of February, according to a new report from the Treasury Department. The budget deficit for February came in at $234 billion, according to the Treasury, higher than the previous monthly record of $231.7 billion set in 2012. […]