Personal income in 42 states fell in 2009, the Commerce Department said Thursday. How state personal income changed in 2009 from 2008. Nevada’s 4.8% plunge was the steepest, as construction and tourism industries took a beating. Also hit hard: Wyoming, where incomes fell 3.9%. Incomes stayed flat in two states and rose in six and the District of Columbia. West Virginia had the best showing with a 2.1% increase. In Maine, Kentucky and Hawaii, increased government benefits, such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, offset drops in earnings and property values. Nationally, personal income from wages, dividends, rent, retirement plans and government benefits declined 1.7% last year, unadjusted for inflation. One bright spot: As the economy recovered, personal income was up in all 50 states in the fourth quarter compared with the third. Connecticut, again, had the highest per capita income of the 50 states at $54,397 in 2009. Mississippi ranked lowest at $30,103.
Climate change: How real? How soon? How political? Three experts with divergent perspectives state their top reasons for what they believe: Science supports global warming 1. Global warming is real. Multiple types of measurements and analyzes (weather stations, sea level monitors, borehole temperatures) agree with each other and show that the planet has warmed by 1.1 ðC or 2 ðF since about 1750. The magnitude of warming, and the rate of warming is beyond natural variation. 2. Warming varies with geography and with time. Climactic changes on planet Earth are not constant in time or space. High latitude regions may warm three times as much as the global average. Some regions may cool for extended periods. Short-term (annual, decadal, multi-decadal) Climactic changes are caused by sun spot cycles, El Nino/ La Nina, volcanic eruptions, and ocean current variations. These natural variations in time and space have existed in the past and should be expected in the future. 3. The global temperature record is best understood as the combination of a slow, long-term warming (un-natural/anthropogenic) and shorter-term fluctuations (natural). The combination is a record that has considerable variability: decade or more periods of temperature stagnation or decrease (1900-1910; […]
The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it is tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday. Banks and other lenders would have to reduce the payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower’s income, which would typically be the amount of unemployment insurance, for three to six months. In some cases, administration officials said, a lender could allow a borrower to skip payments altogether. The new push, which the White House is scheduled to announce Friday, takes direct aim at the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans that went bad, more-recent defaults reflect the country’s economic downturn and the inability of jobless borrowers to keep paying. The administration’s new push also seeks to more aggressively help borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, offering financial incentives for the first time to lenders to cut the loan balances of such distressed homeowners. Those who are still current on […]
Pope Benedict XVI was drawn deeper yesterday into the clerical sex abuse scandal that has begun to overwhelm the Roman Catholic Church, when he was accused of personally failing to take action against a serial paedophile. The Pope was blamed directly for ignoring repeated pleas by senior American churchmen to take action against a priest who had molested up to 200 deaf boys. Father Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at the St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, from 1950 to 1974, starting as a teacher and rising to director, allegedly molested scores of pupils, preying on his victims in their dormitories and on class trips. But instead of being defrocked and the police called in, it is alleged that Father Murphy avoided justice and remained a member of the Church after a key intervention by the Pope - then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Murphy was quietly moved to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974 and spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes and schools. He died in 1998 at the age of 72, still a priest. In 1996 Monsignor Rembert Weakland, then the Archbishop […]
California remained at the bottom of the barrel in national test scores for reading, sharing last place with Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., according to the Nation’s Report Card released Wednesday. The state’s reading scores have remained flat since the last assessment in 2007. Few states showed improvement over the last two years on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, standardized tests given to a sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students nationwide. A couple of states fell back. In California, 54 percent of fourth-grade students and 64 percent of eighth-grade students tested in early 2009 scored at or above the basic reading level, a measure indicating a partial mastery of grade-level content. Nationally, 66 percent of fourth-graders and 74 percent of eighth-graders scored at basic or above levels. Given California’s size and diverse student population along with the relatively low amount of money spent per child on education, the state’s scores aren’t as bad as they appear, said David Gordon, Sacramento County schools superintendent and member of the National Assessment Governing Board. ‘It’s not really helpful to compare California to most of these other states,’ he said. ‘The level of investment we’re making […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
