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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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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We all experience the occasional life-changing event-a new baby, a cross-country move, a serious injury. In rare cases, such events can precipitate a mental disorder. The problem is compounded because people often assume their suffering is par for the course after such upheaval. In reality, relief is probably a short treatment away, via therapy or medication.

The flashbacks, nightmares and sleep problems that mark post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are usually associated with combat or other violent experiences. Now psychiatrists have found that PTSD can also result from being a patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital, according to a recent study in the journal Psychological Medicine.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University checked in with survivors of a lifethreatening lung injury for two years after they were discharged from the ICU. The investigators found that slightly more than one in three in the group suffered from the oftdebilitating anxiety disorder. Patients who had a history of depression were more likely to end up with PTSD after their hospital stay.

As is common in PTSD, the patients had flashbacks of their experiences, such as thinking they were going to die. But these cases were also unusual because the delirium caused by […]

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I’m a longtime subscriber to an Internet [3] mail list that features items from smart, thoughtful people. The list editor forwards items he personally finds interesting, often related to technology and/or civil liberties. Not long after the Guardian and Washington Post first started publishing the leaks describing the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance [4]dragnet, an item appeared about a White House petition [5] urging President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden [6]. The post brought this reply, among others:

‘Once upon a time I would have signed a White House petition to this administration with no qualms. Now, however, a chilling thought occurs: what ‘watch lists’ will signing a petition like this put me on? NSA [7]? IRS? It’s not a paranoid question anymore, in the United States [8] of Surveillance.’

As we Americans watch our parades and fire up our grills this 4 July, the 237th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – the seminal document of the United States – we should take the time to ask ourselves some related questions: how did we come to this state of mind and behavior? How did we become so fearful and timid that we’ve given away essential liberties? Do […]

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Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game – but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. ‘To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,

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