Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Last Tuesday, a coalition of advocacy organizations and health care providers filed suit to overturn the Trump administration’s most sweeping effort to advance the religious right’s discriminatory agenda. This was a Health and Human Services rule announced on May 2 that would vastly expand the “right” of individuals and entities to refuse to provide a service based on religious grounds.
That rule threatens to cut off federal funding to force compliance with its profoundly unworkable requirements. “As a result, health care facilities may do away with reproductive and LGBTQ services altogether, leaving millions without access to critical health care,” the plaintiffs explained in a press release. Dubbed the “denial of care” rule in the lawsuit, it’s not only a perversion of true religious freedom, the suit argues, but a violation of several different constitutional principles, as well as the Administrative Procedures Act, whose requirements were flagrantly ignored.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with the genuine freedom to adhere to one’s religious […]
NEW YORK — Quantifying its vast sex-abuse crisis, the U.S. Roman Catholic Church said Friday that allegations of child sex abuse by clerics more than doubled in its latest 12-month reporting period, and that its spending on victim compensation and child protection surged above $300 million.
During the period from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, 1,385 adults came forward with 1,455 allegations of abuse, according to the annual report of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection. That was up from 693 allegations in the previous year. The report attributed much of the increase to a victim compensation program implemented in five dioceses in New York state.
According to the report, Catholic dioceses and religious orders spent $301.6 million during the reporting period on payments to victims, legal fees and child-protection efforts. That was up 14% from the previous year and double the amount spent in the 2014 fiscal year.
The number of allegations is likely to rise further during the current fiscal year, given that Catholic dioceses in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have […]
Salvador Dali clock
What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be 3019, if there is anyone left to name it. All of us are fluent with these years; we, and most of the world, use them without thinking. They are ubiquitous. As a child I used to line up my pennies by year of minting, and now I carefully note dates of publication in my scholarly articles.
Now, imagine inhabiting a world without such a numbered timeline for ordering current events, memories and future hopes. For from earliest recorded history right up to the years after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late 4th century BCE, historical time – the public and annual marking of the passage of years – could be measured only in three ways: by unique events, by annual offices, or by royal lifecycles.
In ancient Mesopotamia, years could be designated by an outstanding event […]
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during the 2019 budget presentation at Parliament on May 30, 2019 in Wellington, New Zealand. Budget 2019, known as the Wellbeing Budget, has a heavy focus public welfare alongside economic growth. Credit: Hagen Hopkins/Getty
Pledging to follow through on her promise to form a new kind of government focused on benefiting those often overlooked by lawmakers, the prime minister of New Zealand on Thursday unveiled her proposed spending plan for the coming year—the world’s first “wellbeing budget.”
The proposed 2019 budget includes billions of dollars for mental health services, support for indigenous people and victims of domestic violence, and funding to help pull children out of poverty.
“We said that we would be a government that did things differently, and for this budget we have done just that,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “Today we have laid the foundation for not just one wellbeing budget, but a different approach for government decision-making altogether.”
Ardern and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, shared a video on social media ahead of their […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
