In a Christian Post column his week, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land argues that single women are unqualified to raise their children and should always give their kids up for adoption as ‘the best option for everyone concerned.

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Right wing politicians who are push laws to restrict a woman’s access to later-term abortions presumably do so because they don’t want women having abortion after 20 weeks. But new research from medical school-based scholars finds that other policies that conservative Republicans are pushing, including restrictions on access to clinics as well as constrained access to health insurance, actually result in more women seeking later-term abortions. In other words, not only are Republicans hypocrites-but their hypocrisy is backfiring.

Diana Greene Foster and Katrina Kimport are professors in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. Between 2008 and 2010, Foster and Kimport studied the cases of 272 women who had received an abortion at or after 20 weeks of gestation, as well as of 169 women who received first-trimester abortions. These women were interviewed just one week after their abortions and asked a variety of questions including what led to the delay in their medical care. The results are striking and profoundly important for those who seek to promote-or constrict-the rights of women to access and exercise their own reproductive freedom.

The study found that young, low-income women are […]

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Recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which serves as a lifeline to millions of households struggling under a weak economy and high unemployment and underemployment, have been in effect for less than 30 days, but families are already feeling the impact as they struggle to put dinner on the table with reduced food budgets.

As a result, a growing number of families across the country are now turning to local food banks to keep staples like cereal and rice in their pantries.

As the New York Times notes, with Thanksgiving just days away, a line snaked around a Brooklyn block while people waited to enter an area food pantry, hoping to fill their grocery bags with potatoes, onions, milk and – if they were lucky – a chicken or ham for the week. The pantry had long ago run out of turkey, according to Melony Samuels, who runs the food bank.

Samuels’ pantry, like so many others, has been ‘wiped out

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It goes without saying that the rollout of Obamacare was an epic disaster. But what kind of disaster was it? Was it a failure of management, messing up the initial implementation of a fundamentally sound policy? Or was it a demonstration that the Affordable Care Act is inherently unworkable?

We know what each side of the partisan divide wants you to believe. The Obama administration is telling the public that everything will eventually be fixed, and urging Congressional Democrats to keep their nerve. Republicans, on the other hand, are declaring the program an irredeemable failure, which must be scrapped and replaced with … well, they don’t really want to replace it with anything.

At a time like this, you really want a controlled experiment. What would happen if we unveiled a program that looked like Obamacare, in a place that looked like America, but with competent project management that produced a working website?

Well, your wish is granted. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you California.

Now, California isn’t the only place where Obamacare is looking pretty good. A number of states that are running their own online health exchanges instead of relying on HealthCare.gov are doing well. Kentucky’s Kynect is a huge success; so […]

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The Arctic seafloor might have a larger methane time-bomb than previously assumed.

A new study has found that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is releasing 17 teragrams of methane each year, about twice as much as previous estimates. One teragram is about 1 million tons. What’s worse is that climate change might be accelerating its release.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and colleagues.

Methane is the second-most prevalent greenhouse gas in the environment, according to Environmental Protection Agency. Although methane’s lifespan (about 10 years) in the environment is shorter than carbon dioxide, it traps more heat.

In the seabed, the greenhouse gas is stored as methane hydrates. The arctic permafrost acts like a cap, preventing methane from escaping into the atmosphere. Increasing temperatures are now thawing these caps, allowing the gas to escape.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is three times larger than the nearby Siberian wetlands, which was once considered to be a primary source of methane. Previous research had suggested that ESAS was releasing about 8 teragrams of the gas annually.

‘It is now on par with the methane being released from the arctic tundra, which is considered to be one of the major sources […]

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