The Ferguson police department riot squad moving towards a protester. (photo: Getty Images)

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the distribution of military hardware to state and local police out of concern at how such equipment has been used during racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

The president ordered the examination of federal programs and funding that enable state and local law enforcement to purchase such equipment, a senior Obama administration official said on Saturday.

Images of police wielding military-style guns and armor have shocked many Americans following clashes that were triggered by the fatal shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson two weeks ago.

Obama wants to know whether the programs, which were expanded after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are appropriate and whether state and local law enforcement are given proper training, the official said.

The review will be led by White House staff including the Domestic Policy Council, the National Security Council, the Office of Management […]

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Zaida Ramos, employed at Cooperative Home Care Associates, with her son in their East Harlem, N.Y., neighborhood. YES! photo by Stephanie Keith.

Before Zaida Ramos joined Cooperative Home Care Associates, she was raising her daughter on public assistance, shuttling between dead-end office jobs, and not making ends meet. ‘I earned in a week what my family spent in a day,” she recalled.

After 17 years as a home health aide at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker-owned co-op in the United States, Ramos recently celebrated her daughter’s college graduation. She’s paying half of her son’s tuition at a Catholic school, and she’s a worker-owner in a business where she enjoys flexible hours, steady earnings, health and dental insurance, plus an annual share in the profits. She’s not rich, she says, ‘but I’m financially independent. I belong to a union, and I have a chance to make a difference.”

Can worker-owned businesses lift families out of poverty? […]

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CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act have caused U.S. toxic air emissions to drop ‘significantly” – in some cases by more than half – since the law was amended in 1990, the regulatory agency told Congress in a report Thursday.

Since 1990, an estimated 3 million tons of toxins from mobile and stationary sources have been removed from the air every year, according to the report. Emissions of benzene, a pollutant found in natural gas, have dropped in outdoor air by 66 percent, while the amount of mercury from man-made sources like coal plants has dropped by nearly 60 percent, the report said. The amount of lead has decreased the most, by 84 percent since 1990.

‘This report gives everyone fighting for clean air a lot to be proud of,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a statement accompanying the report. ‘But we know our work is not done yet. … we are committed to reducing remaining pollution, especially in low-income neighborhoods.”

The report released Thursday is called the Second […]

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a ‘real racial problem” in America. (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Although the U.S. Supreme Court was “once a leader in the world” in the battle for racial equality, recent decisions by the high court undermine its role in solving a “real racial problem” in America, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in an interview with The National Law Journal on Wednesday.

Citing recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and racially biased stop-and-frisk policies, Ginsburg reflected on the perpetuation of racial segregation in America, comparing the challenges with those of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

“Once [gay] people began to say who they were, you found that it was your next-door neighbor or it could be your child, and we found people we admired,” she said. “That understanding still doesn’t exist with race; you still have separation of neighborhoods, where the races are not mixed. It’s the familiarity with people who are gay that still doesn’t exist for race and will remain that way for […]

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Teen sex rates have fallen rapidly since the world met Bristol Palin. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s some good news: American teens are finally figuring out how to not have babies. According to new numbers released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, the US teen birthrate fell to its lowest point since 1940 last year, with 277,749 babies born to mothers under 20. That means that there were 26.6 births for every 1,000 teen girls in the US in 2013, down 72 percent from an all-time high in 1957.

While we’ve known for a few years now that teen birth rates have been falling, the new CDC data illustrates just how precipitous the drop has been. According to the report, the teen birth rate fell 52 percent between 1991 and 2012, with the number of teen births falling across age groups and ethnicities, and in all 50 states. In that period, the steepest declines were seen […]

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