The United States spends more per capita on health care than any place in the world but lags behind other wealthy nations in health and life expectancy, according to research published on Wednesday.

Japan still leads the world in terms of living the longest, with average life expectancy at 82.6 years in 2010, up from 79.1 years in 1990.

Americans are living longer too — an average of 78.2 years compared to 75.2 two decades ago — but were outpaced by other developed nations as the US ranking for life expectancy slid from 20th to 27th in the world.

Americans are also living with more health problems, ranging from chronic back pain to depression, said the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Disease and disability account for nearly half the health burden in the United States, and poor diet, smoking, high blood pressure and physical inactivity are leading risk factors, it said.

‘Individuals in the United States are living longer but are not necessarily in good health,’ said the study, called ‘The State of US Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors.’

The research is based on data from 34 countries and includes estimates for death and disability from 291 diseases, […]

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WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for ‘high-risk persons or behaviors

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The Supreme Court’s recent decisions on same-sex marriage were a sound rebuke to religious conservatives who have sought to demonize gay Americans and prevent them from sharing rights that their fellow citizens take for granted. But American evangelical groups, undaunted by their losses in America’s culture wars, have been taking their messages-good and bad-to the multitudes of Africa.

Uganda in particular has been a hotbed of American evangelical activity. The landlocked nation has seen more than its share of sorrow, from genocide to the horrors of AIDS to the guerilla terror of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. It has repeatedly ranked among the world’s worst for human rights and freedom of the press. Last year, Foreign Policy and Fund for Peace classified Uganda as a ‘failed state.’ [10]

In recent years, the country has drawn ire for its Anti-Homosexuality Bill, known more ominously as the ‘kill the gays’ bill [7] because, if approved, it would mean the execution of recidivist homosexuals. There are plenty of live-wire personalities, not the least of whom is the Reverend Martin Ssempa, who’s found that there’s nothing like gay fetish porn for stoking a congregation’s bloodlust.
Kansas City-based mega-church IHOP is highly active in Uganda, and hopes […]

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It’s a warm summer evening, and you’re on a back porch with a group of friends, drinking a beer and getting ready for dinner. Someone passes you a paper plate, a seeded bun, and-wait, you don’t eat meat? Oh. Well, here’s a tomato and some lettuce.

If you steer clear of beef, you’ve probably experienced a similar scenario. If you’re lucky, you maybe even found a frozen soy patty masquerading as a burger that, when grilled, sort of tasted like nothing, and drenched it in mustard.

I know: Vegetarians need to stop whining about missing out at barbecues because we choose to ax delicious, juicy hamburgers from our diets. But even if you’re just trying to cut back on meat, or trying to impress a vegetarian, the alternatives usually offered are lackluster at best, and unhealthy and environmentally questionable at worst. As my colleague Kiera Butler reveals, it can take just as much energy to produce a veggie burger as a beef burger, and many soy-based fake meats are processed with hexane, a neurotoxin.

Luckily, there are savory alternatives to this dilemma, made from ingredients you probably have at home. I reached out to a few vegetable-oriented chefs and cookbook authors for their […]

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More than half of respondents in a global corruption survey released Tuesday think that graft has worsened over the past two years, and a quarter reported having paid officials a bribe in the last 12 months.

The survey by Berlin-based non-profit group Transparency International also found that people have least trust in institutions meant to help or protect them, including police, the courts and political parties.

Respondents also believed official anti-corruption efforts had deteriorated since the 2008 start of the world financial and economic crisis.

The group’s Global Corruption Barometer 2013 is the world’s largest public opinion survey on corruption. It surveyed 114,000 people in 107 countries, the group said.

It found that 27 per cent of respondents had said they had paid a bribe to a member of a public service or institution in the past 12 months, revealing no improvement from previous surveys.

The group pointed to a link between poverty and graft. Eight of the 10 countries with the highest bribery rates are African, said a Transparency spokesman.

In 36 countries, respondents viewed police as the most corrupt, while 20 countries view the judiciary as the most graft-ridden. In 51 countries political parties were seen as the most corrupt institution.

People’s appraisal of government […]

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