Food Insecurity Rises Across the US
In 2023, across all regions and states in the US, food banks and food assistance programs experienced record-breaking demand from families unable to feed themselves. The rising cost of food, the inability of wages to keep up with soaring prices, and the elimination of federal pandemic food assistance programs […]
Bank Closures
Growing numbers of Americans are being left without access to basic financial services as bank branches are being closed across the country. Data from S&P Global Market Intelligence shows that a total of 1,144 national and regional banks were closed between January 1 and July 31 across 49 states. California had the most […]
When AI Lies to You
An attorney who used legal precedence that he obtained from ChatGPT to argue a client’s court case was recently humiliated to find that the chatbot had lied to him. The attorney, Steven Schwartz, was representing Roberto Mata in his suit against Avianca Airlines for injuries he sustained from a serving […]
Street Evangelism Right Upheld—For Now
The city of Chicago has settled with Wheaton College students who were prohibited from evangelizing in the city’s Millennium Park in 2018. The case pushed the city to change park regulations to allow evangelizing and other public speech. City rules prohibited “the making of speeches” and passing out of literature […]
Holiday Storms Create Havoc
The timing of Winter Storm Elliott couldn’t have been worse. One of the coldest Christmas storms in modern memory, it formed in the Pacific Northwest and intensified in the Great Lakes, bringing blizzard conditions to several states. By Christmas Eve, Elliott’s strong winds and brutally cold temperatures were affecting the entire […]
China’s Developing Social Credit System
For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an image of a web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But according to MIT’s China Report, there’s no central social credit score for individuals or algorithms for doing […]
Caught without Cash
Cashless societies and digital banking are the trend in many countries around the world. But are we really ready to abandon cash? Canadians may say, No! In Canada, three communications monopolies control 90 percent of the country's telecoms market. In July, customers of one of them, Rogers Communications, lost service for 19 […]
WHO Says More Pandemics Ahead
Outbreaks of animal-to-human diseases such as monkeypox and Lassa fever are becoming more persistent and frequent and are spreading, the World Health Organization's (WHO) emergencies director, Mike Ryan, warned recently. By June 1, the WHO had received reports of more than 550 confirmed cases of monkeypox from 30 countries since […]
What shall be the sign of Thy coming, and of the end of the world? Matthew 24:3
Largest US Catholic University Offers Nine Gender Options
DePaul University, which promotes itself as the largest Catholic university in the U.S., now has a website offering its students nine different gender identity options. The school's Student Government Association […]
The Chimera Controversy
Researchers in the US and China injected human stem cells into monkey embryos to create the first ever human-monkey embryos. These embryos are known as chimeras—organisms that are made of two different sets of DNA, often both human and animal. The 132 human-monkey embryos didn’t survive long, however. Within 19 days, only three […]