Every year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) measures 149 countries on their progress towards gender parity across four categories: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. In 2018, the United States ranked No. 51 out of the 149 countries measured, but that wasn’t the headline that made waves. In June 2019, the WEF released a shocking new finding: At the current rate of change, it will take the United States 208 years to close the gender gap. (emphasis added)

It’s important to note that the WEF is not measuring women’s empowerment by country; it’s measuring gender parity, which is to say the gap between men and women. While the US has actually seen improvement in three of the four categories over the last dozen years, it has declined in one key category: health and survival. One reason is that the maternal mortality rate is worse in the United States than any other developed country. Another is that the healthy life expectancy for both women and men has declined in the last 12 years, but the […]

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Credit: CNS /Theresa Laurence, Tennessee Register

A faith-based health system’s firing of a doctor who challenged its ban on aid-in-dying could become the latest front in the effort by religious corporations to expand their rights.

Dr. Barbara Morris worked for Centura Health in Colorado, a Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist health system that banned her, on religious grounds, from helping a patient with terminal cancer who was requesting access to lethal medication. In Colorado, where such prescriptions are legal, more than a third of acute-care hospital beds operate under Catholic rules that ban abortion, most forms of contraception, sterilization, in vitro fertilization and aid-in-dying. Nationwide, Catholic hospitals have denied gender-affirming care to transgender patients, pressured people to bury their miscarried fetuses and turned away or delayed care to patients who are miscarrying. The Seventh-day Adventist Church also opposes abortion and aid-in-dying.

Colorado’s aid-in-dying law, passed by voters in 2016, allows religious facilities to ban doctors from prescribing lethal medication when the patient intends to use it “on the facility’s premises.” Morris’s patient, Neil Mahoney, planned to take the […]

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Sometimes our drinking water systems experience dangerous failures, such as the Flint lead poisoning disaster that made major news beginning in 2014. But outside those headline grabbing crises, how safe is our drinking.

The nonprofit Environmental Working Group wants to help you answer that question. It has collected all the water-quality information that utilities in the U.S. submit to their state environmental or public health agencies. That information has been compiled into a newly updated database that allows residents to check the safety of tap water in their community and then learn what kind of actions they can take if their water contains contaminants. In many cases it’s as simple as adding a filter.

The millionaires of the world, who account for just 0.9 percent of the global population, now own nearly half of the planet’s $361 trillion in wealth while the bottom 56 percent of the population owns just 1.8 percent.

That’s according to the annual Global Wealth Report released Monday by Credit Suisse, which found that the number of millionaires in the world grew to 47 million between mid-2018 and mid-2019, with the United States leading the world in both new and total millionaires.

According to Credit Suisse, the U.S. added 675,000 new millionaires over the past year, bringing the country’s total to 18.6 million.

Japan and China both added over 150,000 millionaires, while the U.K., France, Australia, and Italy were among the nations that saw a decline in millionaires.

Overall, the report shows the world’s millionaires now own a combined $158.3 trillion, or 43.9 percent of all global wealth:

The new figures detailing vast inequities in wealth distribution globally and within individual nations come as two of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S., Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), […]

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