News: Quick Links | Sojourners

News: Quick Links

We Are All Occupiers Now: The Mainstreaming of OWS
What a difference a few short weeks can make. The early word on Occupy Wall Street was that it was a motley collection of flakes and fools. "Purpose in 140 or less," tweeted CNN financial correspondent Alison Kosik, "bang on the bongos, smoke weed!" (She's since deleted that tweet.) New York Times financial writer Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of Too Big to Fail, asked on CNBC's Squawk Box, "Do we think that the whole Wall Street protest is overdone, real, not real? Were there really a lot of people down there? Were there a lot? I could never tell."
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10 Cities With The Lowest Poverty Rates: U.S. Census
A growing number of Americans entered into poverty last year. But certain cities survived the recession with especially low poverty rates. Across metropolitan America, poverty rates vary widely, according to a recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Indeed, the city with the highest poverty rate and that with the lowest are separated by a full 25 percentage points. The report examined poverty levels in areas with more than 500,000 people last year.
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Senators Push For Syria's Assad To Be Charged With Crimes Against Humanity
Four Democratic senators urged U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to push the U.N. Security Council to refer Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to an international war crimes tribunal because of a brutal seven-month crackdown against massive and largely unarmed anti-government protests.
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Surprise! The Rich Are Still Getting Richer
In news that will surprise almost no one currently trying to occupy Wall Street, a new government report shows that the income of the top 1 percent is larger than ever and continuing to grow. According to a new Congressional Budget Office report released on Tuesday, since 1979 the average, after-tax income of the top one percent of American households has risen 275 percent. Meanwhile, for the poorest one-fifth of the country, it's gone up just 18 percent. And for the biggest slice of "middle class" America -- the three-fifths of homes between the top and bottom 20 percent -- incomes have risen just 40 percent.
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Paul Ryan To Slam Obama For 'Politics Of Division'
As President Obama continues a swing out West on Wednesday to push his economic proposals, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan plans to launch a blistering response in a speech in Washington. Ryan will argue the president is practicing "the politics of division" and will say Obama needs to reverse course from a "path of debt, doubt, and decline," according to a Ryan aide familiar with the remarks.
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Does Pope Benedict Support Occupy Wall Street?
Does the Vatican's new document calling for a "central world bank" and a "supranational authority" to advance the common economic good mean that Pope Benedict supports the complaints behind the Occupy Wall Street movement? " 'The basic sentiment' behind the protests is in line with Catholic social teaching and the new document on global finance issued Oct. 24 by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace," council President Cardinal Peter Turkson, said to the National Catholic Reporter.
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Clergy Petition Village Voice To Drop Ads Linked To Sex Trafficking
Three dozen religious leaders have signed an ad calling on Village Voice Media to remove an adult section of its BackPage.com that they and others claim is a conduit for child sex trafficking. "As moral and religious leaders of many creeds and backgrounds, we are united in calling on your publication to shut down the Adult section of Backpage.com, reads an open letter to Village Voice Media CEO Jim Larkin in an ad published Tuesday (Oct. 25) in The New York Times.
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