Author: Reporter

Pandemic puppies: Animal shelters face overcrowding as families abandoned pets over housing struggles

Kaine is a big, buoyant dog looking for a home. But lately, he is spending a lot of time at the office. Animal shelters around the U.S. are bursting at the seams amid the rising cost of living, so the gray and white 7-year-old has been staying in a worker’s office at the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society while awaiting adoption. The shelter near Albany, New York, is “beyond full,” said CEO Ashley Jeffrey Bouck. That means Kaine — along with his crate, dog bed and chewy toys — has to share space with a staffer, a desk and file...

Read More

Warehouse liquidation: Wisconsin joins list of states trashing stockpiles of vital pandemic gear

When the coronavirus pandemic took hold in an unprepared U.S., states scrambled for masks and other protective gear. Three years later, as the grips of the pandemic have loosened, many states are now trying to deal with an excess of protective gear, ditching their supplies in droves. With expiration dates passing and few requests to tap into its stockpile, Ohio auctioned off 393,000 gowns for just $2,451 and ended up throwing away another 7.2 million, along with expired masks, gloves and other materials. The now expiring supplies had cost about $29 million in federal money. A similar reckoning is...

Read More

End of pandemic aid and soaring rent prices drive homelessness up to a record 12% nationwide

The United States experienced a dramatic 12% increase in homelessness to its highest reported level as soaring rents and a decline in coronavirus pandemic assistance combined to put housing out of reach for more Americans, according to federal officials. About 653,000 people were homeless, the most since the country began using the yearly point-in-time survey in 2007. The total in the January count represents an increase of about 70,650 from a year earlier. The latest estimate indicates that people becoming homeless for the first time were behind much of the increase. A rise in family homelessness ended a downward...

Read More

Memorial gatherings for homeless who die without family connections becoming a national trend

With his gap-tooth smile, hip-hop routines and volunteer work for a food charity, Roosevelt White III was well known in the downtown Phoenix tent city known as “The Zone.” But like many homeless people, White suffered from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He died unexpectedly one sweltering September day at age 36. Thousands of people like White who died in 2023 without a permanent home were memorialized in communities from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to Riverside, California. Established in 1990, the increasingly popular Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day is observed with prayers, candles, moments of silence and the...

Read More

John Birch Society: The roots of America’s modern conspiracy theory run deep in small-town Wisconsin

The decades fall away as you open the front doors. It was the late 1950s in the cramped little offices. At the John Birch Society, they have been waging war for more than 60 years against what they are sure is a vast and diabolical conspiracy. It was a place where army-style buzz cuts are still in fashion, communism remains the primary enemy, and the decor is dominated by American flags and portraits of once-famous Cold Warriors. As they see it, America is under threat. The plot has tentacles that reach from 19th-century railroad magnates to the Biden White...

Read More

American women are reacting to reproductive restrictions by stocking up on abortion pills

Thousands of women stocked up on abortion pills just in case they needed them, new research shows, with demand peaking in the past couple years at times when it looked like the medications might become harder to get. Medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who were not pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use. Aid...

Read More