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A new government report found that both drinking and binge drinking among young people fell significantly between 2002 and 2013.
The percentage of underage people who drank declined from 28.8 percent to 22.7 percent. The proportion of binge drinkers — people who consumed five or more drinks during one occasion — decreased from 19.3 percent to 14.2 percent, according to the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The study is the latest evidence that alcohol might be losing some of its allure for underage youth, defined in the study as 12 to 20 years old.
Based on the survey, which involved more than 30,000 people in that age group across the country, there are about 8.7 million underage drinkers in the United States, and about 5.4 million were binge drinkers.
The survey also found that alcohol remains the preferred substance of abuse among youths. Seventeen percent of respondents reported using tobacco while 13.6 percent reported using illicit drugs, the report said.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us.”
Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling…the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions.” His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.
According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L’Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ confidence in each of the three branches of the U.S. government remains low, with confidence in Congress and the Supreme Court near their all-time lows reached last year. Currently, 33% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency, 32% are this confident in the Supreme Court, and Congress is still well behind, at 8%.
While Congress has consistently received the lowest confidence rating of the three branches of government, the Supreme Court and the presidency usually track each other closely. This is apart from times when the incumbent president has been extremely popular, as in 1991 and 2002, or exceptionally unpopular, as in 2007 and 2008.
Gallup’s June 2-7 poll found confidence in the presidency rising slightly to 33% from 29% last year, which in turn was just four percentage points above the historical low of 25% in 2007. The uptick in confidence in the presidency this year is consistent with Americans’ higher job approval ratings of President Barack Obama since last fall.
Meanwhile, ratings of the Supreme Court and Congress, which had dropped to record lows in […]
The Beginnings of Moral Religion
These five major movements mark the beginning of humanity’s turn toward religions that emphasize personal morality and asceticism, according to a new study.
About 2,500 years ago something changed the way humans think. Within the span of two centuries, in three separate regions of Eurasia, spiritual movements emerged that would give rise to the world’s major moral religions, those preaching some combination of compassion, humility and asceticism. Scholars often attribute the rise of these moral religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity included—to population growth, seeing morality as a necessary social stabilizer in increasingly large and volatile human communities. Yet findings from a recent study published in Current Biology point to a different factor: rising affluence.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA — The average American woman
now weighs as much as the average American man weighed in 1960.
Both U.S. men and women have been packing on the pounds since 1960, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that the average American woman now weighs 166.2 pounds – nearly identical to what American men weighed in the 1960s. And U.S. men have expanded greatly in the same time period, having gained nearly 30 pounds from the 1960s to 2010 – 166.3 pounds to 195.5 pounds today.
The CDC data shows that both sexes have gained almost an inch in height from the 1960s, which factors into some of the overall weight gain. But women have seen an 18.5 percent increase in weight gain from 1960 and men have shown a 17.6 percent increase in overall weight gain.
Today’s American male weighs nearly as much as 1.5 American females from the 1960s, with today’s U.S. male weighing an average 195.5 pounds and having a nearly 40-inch waist circumference (39.7 inches).
American women today […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
