47 million Americans are now on food stamps,. In 2000 the figure was 18 million. It is not so much that there are insufficient jobs (although there are insufficient jobs!). The fact is that wages will not allow those who used to regard themselves as part of the middle class to earn enough to live …
Recently released documents have suggested that Timothy Dolan, America’s most senior Catholic official and cardinal for the archdiocese of New York, sought to shield church money from the victims of paedophile priests while working as archbishop of Milwaukee in the early 2000s. As sex abuse claims mounted up, Dolan asked the Vatican for permission to …
Slowly but surely, the US is waddling towards the moment when every chain restaurant will have to advertise the calorie count of each item it sells. The American Medical Association has voted to classify obesity as a disease, which means that the roughly 90 million Americans who qualify as obese – almost a third of …
Michael Bird asserts that great art is amoral and that culture and civilisation are not the same thing. I disagree profoundly: art in itself is the transmission of value, and its interpretation echoes this. Moreover, culture and civilisation are the means whereby humanity can live creatively in society and see beyond itself for inspiration and …
Grown-up children who fail to visit their elderly parents, or who do not attend to their “spiritual needs”, will henceforth face the prospect of fines or even prison, under a new Chinese law that has just come into effect. China’s “Elderly Rights Law” is an attempt to deal with the country’s rapidly ageing population: by …
