Retired Americans are racking up credit-card debt like never before, be it for vacations or medical expenses, and a surprising number have no intention of paying it off before they die.

Nearly 40% of retired Americans said they’ve accumulated credit-card debt in their twilight years - and aren’t worried about paying it off in their lifetime, according to a survey released by CESI Debt Solutions.

‘At the end of the day, some people of a certain age say, ‘It’s too late in the game for me to do anything about it. I can’t win. So I’m just going to stop playing the game,” said Neil Ellington, executive vice president at CESI.

This may come as a surprise to younger generations who thought their parents, the so-called Greatest Generation, were more responsible than youngsters raised in an era of easy money, a culture of credit.

But remember that this is the generation that frowns upon talking about money - and certainly would be embarrassed by any potential money problems. Add in a recession that slashed many retirement accounts in half and that leaves a generation sinking deeper into debt, with a diminishing timeframe to do anything about it - and too much pride to talk […]

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Cities at sea level around the world – including Bangkok, New Orleans, Shanghai and Amsterdam – are bracing themselves for rising seas and sinking ground. Populations on river deltas, atolls and islands face flooding and displacement. Sea-level rise accumulates slowly, measured in millimetres a year, but the incremental pace can deceive us. Sea-level rise, particularly when combined with sinking land, presents a growing problem.

Consider that the rate of sea-level rise is itself rising. Sea rise remained virtually zero over the last several millennia. Then, in the 20th century, the sea rose about 20 centimeters. Now, today, the rate has reached about 30 centimeters per century, and still increasing. Recently, oceanographers have boosted their predictions of 21st century sea level rise from about 20 centimetres to a metre or more.

Sea-level rise is not uniform around the world. Gravitational forces, including the gravity of ice caps themselves, cause uneven fluctuations. Meanwhile, some coastal plains sink as others rise, so exaggerating sea-level rise in some regions and cancelling it in others. Furthermore, if humanity cannot change its hydrocarbon habits quickly enough, we risk runaway warming that could accelerate sea-level rise.

In an extreme runaway scenario, a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet would […]

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In an essay for a college English class, Charles Whittington Jr. opened up about his feelings about his time in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘Killing becomes a drug, and it is really addictive. I had a really hard time with this problem when I returned to the United States, because turning this addiction off was impossible,’ Whittington wrote in the essay for his class at the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville, Md.

‘I wrote this essay and the teacher gave me an A for it, and she encouraged me to publish it in the school newspaper,’ Whittington said. ‘Two weeks later, it was published.’

After reading it, college administrators called Whittington into a meeting.

‘They said he’s barred until he gets a psychological evaluation,’ said Deborah O’Doherty, president of the Maryland chapter of American War Mothers and a friend of Whittington’s family. She attended the meeting with Whittington. ‘They also gave him a no-trespass notice and kept bringing up the Virginia Tech shooting.’

‘I was really frustrated, because they didn’t give me a chance to explain,’ said Whittington. ‘I wrote the paper to talk about the reality of what other soldiers go through and it was therapeutic for me.’

Hope Davis, a college […]

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Screaming ‘kill, kill, kill,’ suicide bombers belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant organization connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, stormed a Chaldean church in Baghdad on Sunday. A spokesman for the group subsequently claimed they did so ‘to light the fuse of a campaign against Iraqi Christians.’ The assailants’ more immediate grievance seems related to a demand that two Muslim women, allegedly held against their will in Egyptian Coptic monasteries, be released. When Iraqi government forces attempted to free approximately 120 parishioners who had been taken hostage, the terrorists — who had already shot dead some of the churchgoers — detonated their suicide vests and grenades, slaughtering at least half the congregation.

But the massacre in Baghdad is only the most spectacular example of mounting discrimination and persecution of the native Christian communities of Iraq and Iran, which are now in the middle of a massive exodus unprecedented in modern times as they confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy and religious chauvinism sweeping the region.

Christians are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in both Iraq and Iran, with roots in the Middle East that date back to the earliest days of the faith. Some follow the Apostolic Orthodox […]

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Secondhand smoke sickens millions and kills more than 600,000 people worldwide each year, including more than 165,000 children under 5, according to the first report to estimate the worldwide burden of disease and death from tobacco.

The World Health Organization’s report on 192 countries appeared in The Lancet on Thursday and found more than half of the deaths are from heart disease, followed by deaths from cancer, lung infections, asthma and other ailments.

More than two-thirds of the children’s deaths are in Africa and Asia, where they have less access to important public health services, such as vaccines, and less advanced medical care, the report says.

‘These (statistics) are sad data,’ the American Cancer Society’s Tom Glynn says.

Tobacco kills a total of 5.7 million people worldwide each year, including 5.1 million people who die from their own smoking, the report says. Smoking is the world’s leading cause of preventable death, according to the WHO.

Growing concern about secondhand smoke has led more than 40 countries to enact some kind of smoking ban, although many of these laws are limited, according to Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights.

In the USA, 35 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Northern Mariana Islands have smoke-free laws, protecting 79% […]

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