Richard Gaines is one of the best-known faces on Camden’s Haddon Avenue. It is a rough-and-tumble street, lined with cheap businesses and boarded-up houses, and is prey to drug gangs. Gaines, 50, runs a barbershop, a hair salon and a fitness business. He works hard and is committed to his community. But Haddon Avenue is not an easy place to make a living in the best of times. And these are far from the best of times.

Just how badly the great recession has struck this fragile New Jersey city, which is currently the poorest in America, was recently spelled out to Gaines. In happier times – whatever that might mean for a city as destitute as Camden – local businesses on Haddon Avenue could at least rely on a bit of trade from those who made their money on the street.

Young men bought flashy clothes and got sharp haircuts and always paid in cash. But no longer. The economy is now so bad in Camden that even the criminals are struggling and going short. ‘Even the guys who got money from illegal means really don’t want to spend it,’ Gaines said.

Such a development, though, is just a snapshot of the […]

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When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.

‘The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,

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As she and her husband drove home after celebrating their 25th anniversary on the coast, Tracy Bryan realized with a shock that being married to him was not how she wanted to grow old.

‘We had grown and changed,’ said Bryan, now 53, whose divorce from her college sweetheart was final in 2008. ‘I changed what I wanted out of life.’

As baby boomers approach retirement age looking forward to many more long, healthy years of life, the number of couples calling it quits after decades of marriage is on the rise.

Born between 1946 and 1964, boomers already have a divorce rate triple that of their parents. And now they’re pioneering a new trend in splitting up: the so-called ‘gray divorce’ phenomenon of couples going their separate ways after 20 or more years together.

Their parents were labeled the ‘Greatest Generation.’ Now some experts are calling baby boomers ‘the greatest divorcing generation.’

As AARP California’s Christina Clem says, the baby boom remains at the center of a huge cultural shift.

‘Older people grew up in a time when they had no choice but to stick together to make it through life,’ said psychologist Becky Shook, president of Fairway Divorce Solutions’ local office. ‘Baby boomers come […]

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WASHINGTON — Global wheat markets reeling from Russian droughts, thousands of cattle killed by heat in Kansas, and countless crop acres wiped out by floods in Pakistan are glimpses of what can be expected as the world struggles to battle climate change.

But as concerns mount over extreme weather hitting global food systems this year, governments are no closer to forging a pact to fight climate change.

When temperatures rise as a result of smokestack and tailpipe emissions, droughts, heat waves, and floods become more frequent and more intense. The temperatures create ‘more and more hot extremes and worse unprecedented extremes and that’s what we’re seeing,’ said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

As the number of extreme weather events mount, they will likely create havoc in agricultural markets and could lead to food riots in poor countries like those in 2007 and 2008 when prices hit records on rabid market speculation.

Yet global talks to battle emissions are grinding to a near halt after the U.S. Senate failed to pass a climate bill and the administration of President Barack Obama also failed to push for one.

As the United States, the top major emitter per capita, fails to forge […]

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A major new international study released Friday has found that adolescents who take acetaminophen, better known under the brand name Tylenol, have a higher risk of asthma, allergic nasal conditions and the skin disorder eczema.

Those who took the common painkiller as infrequently as once a month had twice the normal risk of developing the disorders. Experts noted, however, that the study does not show that the drug causes the problems. In fact, some said, it is equally likely that the children were taking the drug because they were already suffering from asthma.

Acetaminophen is widely viewed as a very safe drug-one reason why hospitals use it routinely as a painkiller instead of aspirin or ibuprofen. The major problem associated with it is liver damage caused by overdoses. Recently, however, there has been a growing drumbeat about possible dangers from the drug. One study, for example, found that acetaminophen increased the risk of hearing loss in men. And some others have hinted that the drug is linked to asthma in newborns whose mothers used the drug during pregnancy and in young children exposed to it.

The new findings were reported in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by researchers […]

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