WASHINGTON — In rural communities and urban areas alike, one of the least expensive and most unheralded new initiatives of the stimulus bill is quietly saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from homelessness.

Now housing advocates want Congress to boost the program’s $1.5 billion funding as the vast need for more assistance becomes evident nationwide.

The Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program is expected to help 600,000 people by moving some from homeless shelters into their own apartments and by providing rent payments to prevent others from being evicted.

Because the assistance is temporary – usually for three months to 18 months – the program tries to target people who are most in need and can who can return to self-sufficiency within a few months.

Experts say the initiative breaks new ground in federal housing policy by focusing more resources on preventing homelessness and getting people back on their feet, rather than just feeding and warehousing the destitute.

‘When you think about it, it really makes sense to focus on getting people back into housing faster,’ said Nan Roman, executive director of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. ‘Instead of long stays in some homeless facility with a lot of service delivery, wouldn’t little bit […]

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n the centre of the rebuilt Beirut, the massive old Maronite Cathedral of St George stands beside the even larger mass of the new Mohammad al-Amin mosque.

The mosque’s minarets tower over the cathedral, but the Maronites were built a spanking new archbishop’s house between the two buildings as compensation. Yet every day, the two calls to prayer – the clanging of church bells and the wailing of the muezzin – beat an infernal percussion across the city. Both bells and wails are tape recordings, but they have been turned up to the highest decibel pitch to outdo each other, louder than an aircraft’s roar, almost as crazed as the nightclub music from Gemmayzeh across the square. But the Christians are leaving.

Across the Middle East, it is the same story of despairing – sometimes frightened – Christian minorities, and of an exodus that reaches almost Biblical proportions. Almost half of Iraq’s Christians have fled their country since the first Gulf War in 1991, most of them after the 2004 invasion – a weird tribute to the self-proclaimed Christian faith of the two Bush presidents who went to war with Iraq – and stand now at 550,000, scarcely 3 per cent of […]

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Many are constantly searching for the key to more satisfying sex, but a recent study suggests that finding that key may be easier than we think.

Researchers at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Texas-Austin found that women experienced improvements in symptoms such as low sex drive just from getting a placebo in a clinical trial.

Women may have experienced increased satisfaction simply because they decided to take action and experienced increased hope, says researcher Andrea Bradford. The study was published in September in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

‘It’s not going to change if you just wait for it to happen,’ Bradford says. ‘Changing how you approach the problem might in itself make a big difference.’

Bradford and psychology professor Cindy Meston used data that drug company Lilly ICOS collected in a clinical trial of Cialis, an erectile dysfunction drug, on women. One-third of the 50 women on the placebo experienced more satisfying sex over a 12-week period, during which they completed questionnaires and met with clinicians to assess symptoms.

Measuring female sexual dysfunction and satisfaction can be difficult sometimes, because it is very much based on the woman’s own observations of her symptoms, says Meston.

‘Sexual dysfunction is, in a way, what […]

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WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body.

I’m paraphrasing here. But the legal departments of cellphone manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn’t want iPhones to come closer than 5/8 of an inch; Research In Motion, BlackBerry’s manufacturer, is still more cautious: keep a distance of about an inch.

The warnings may be missed by an awful lot of customers. The United States has 292 million wireless numbers in use, approaching one for every adult and child, according to C.T.I.A.-The Wireless Association, the cellphone industry’s primary trade group. It says that as of June, about a quarter of domestic households were wireless-only.

If health issues arise from ordinary use of this hardware, it would affect not just many customers but also a huge industry. Our voice calls - we chat on our cellphones 2.26 trillion minutes annually, according to the C.T.I.A. - generate $109 billion for the wireless carriers.

The cellphone instructions-cum-warnings were brought to my attention by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist […]

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The loans are propelling large and prominent cases. Lenders including Counsel Financial, a Buffalo company financed by Citigroup, provided $35 million for the lawsuits brought by ground zero workers that were settled tentatively in June for $712.5 million. The lenders earned about $11 million.

Most investments are in the smaller cases that fill court dockets. Ardec Funding, a New York lender backed by a hedge fund, lent $45,000 in June to a Manhattan lawyer hired by the parents of a baby brain-damaged at birth. The lawyer hired two doctors, a physical therapist and an economist to testify at a July trial. The jury ordered the delivering doctor and hospital to pay the baby $510,000. Ardec is collecting interest at an annual rate of 24 percent, or $900 a month, until the award is paid.

Total investments in lawsuits at any given time now exceed $1 billion, several industry participants estimated. Although no figures are available on the number of lawsuits supported by lenders, public records from one state, New York, show that over the last decade, more than 250 law firms borrowed on pending cases, often repeatedly.

The rise of lending to plaintiffs and their lawyers is a result of the high cost […]

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