Author: Reporter

U.S. life expectancy rose in 2022, by more than a year, but still is not close to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The rise in 2022 was mainly due to the waning pandemic, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said in December. But even with the large increase, U.S. life expectancy is only back to 77 years, 6 months — about what it was two decades ago. Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, assuming the death rates at that time...

New obesity drugs are showing promising results in helping some people shed pounds but the injections will remain out of reach for millions of older Americans because Medicare is forbidden to cover such medications. Drugmakers and a wide-ranging and growing bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are gearing up to push for that to change in 2024. As obesity rates rise among older adults, some lawmakers say the United States cannot afford to keep a decades-old law that prohibits Medicare from paying for new weight loss drugs, including Wegovy and Zepbound. But research shows the initial price tag of covering those...

A new guide from the Department of Homeland Security released in late December aims to help churches, synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship protect themselves at a time of heightened tensions in faith-based communities across the country. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of Homeland Security, works with faith groups across the country to help them prepare for and prevent targeted violence against their facilities and their members. David Mussington, who is in charge of infrastructure security at CISA, says the goal of the 16-page document is to give useable information in a format that is...

Flooding is driving millions of people to move out of their homes, limiting growth in some prospering communities, and accelerating the decline of others, according to a new study that details how climate change and flooding are transforming where Americans live. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the threat of flooding convinced more than 7 million people to avoid risky areas or abandon places that were risky, according to a paper in December by the journal Nature Communications and research by the risk analysis organization First Street Foundation. Climate change is making bad hurricanes more intense...

Justin Ralph estimates he has made about 200 trips delivering grain from the fields he farms with his brother and uncle this year. They were accustomed to using their four semi-trucks to take the harvest from a total of about 800 acres each of corn, soybeans, and wheat to market. What they were not used to are the distances they had to drive the past couple years, a consequence of bad weather that was only expected to increase in their area as a result of climate change. They used to take advantage of a grain elevator in Mayfield, Kentucky...