On any given night in the United States, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, over half a million people are without a home. That number may have decreased nationwide in the past few years, but California remains on the forefront of the problem, accounting for 20 percent of the country’s homeless in 2014.

Homeless elder sleeping on the streets

With the winter’s freezing temperatures and El Niño’s massive rainstorms, what to do about the thousands living in our city streets has been making headlines on both the East and West coasts.

What policymakers and the general public need to recognize is that the homeless are aging faster than the general population in the U.S. This shift in the demographics has major implications for how municipalities and health care providers deal with homeless populations.

In the early 1990s, only 11 percent of the adult homeless population was aged 50 and over. That percentage was up to 37 by 2003. Today half of America’s homeless are over 50.

In fact, people born […]

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Monsanto’s corruption seems to be catching up with them as sales drop and protests continue to hold them responsible for the dangers of GMOs.

While Monsanto seems to tower over the agriculture industry, both in terms of its political power and its potentially detrimental effects on the environment, low earnings are cutting into corporate profits and costing employees their jobs.

Monsanto had already announced a major wave of layoffs in October when the corporation reported a profit of $3.5 billion for the 2015 fiscal year, a decline of about 13.5 percent from the previous year. At the time, according to Irish Farmers Journal’s Lorcan Allen, the corporation “said it expects to cut up to 2,600 jobs in the next 24 months with a target to make annual savings of $275-300m by the end of 2017.”

Earnings continued to fall in the first quarter of the 2016 fiscal year, […]

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Crack in the library at St. Francis of the Woods.
Credit: Julie Dermansky

There is a general consensus in Oklahoma that the record-breaking number of earthquakes occurring in the state are caused by the disposal of fracking wastewater in injection wells. But there’s no agreement on what to do to stop them.

“We are human guinea pigs in a fracking industry experiment,” Angela Spotts, founder of Stop Fracking Payne County and a Stillwater, Oklahoma homeowner, told DeSmog. “Regulators tell us they can get the earthquakes under control as they tinker with the quantity that wastewater wells are allowed to inject into the ground. But despite their efforts, the quakes have continued.”

Spotts’ group has called for a moratorium on injection wells that dispose of fracking wastewater. “Shutting the wells down stopped the earthquakes that hit Arkansas. That is what we need to do here too,” Spotts said.

Angela Spotts at the earthquake hearing in the State Capitol. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Matt Skinner, spokesman […]

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Lockheed Raptor Aircraft

War is hell.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a global corporate peddler of rockets, drones, bombs, and all the other hellish weaponry of military conflict. In that case, war is manna from hell. So bring it on.

Indeed, it seems as if Beelzebub himself is in charge these days, with U.S. military forces enmeshed in at least 135 countries in 2015 alone. Plus, such chicken hawks as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are maniacally beating their flabby chests and screeching for even more military adventurism.

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This perpetual warmongering is music to the ears of the people who serve as the CEOs and biggest investors in the war machine. It means a windfall of perpetual profits for them.

In a rare admission of their war-profiteering ethic, a group of major military contractors spoke late last year about how splendid war is. In leaked tapes from a wealthy investor conference reported by The Intercept, top weapon makers […]

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