Credit: TBO.com

Hurricane Irma plundered Florida’s orange belt, leaving a trail of uprooted trees, downed fruit and flooded groves worse than anything growers say they have seen in more than 20 years.

It could even be the knockout blow for a product — orange juice — that has been slipping in popularity among Americans, although the beverage still ranks as the country’s favorite “fruit.”

The most recent estimates of the widespread damage to Florida’s orange trees put the statewide losses as high as 70 percent. That could lead to orange shortages, price hikes and, for farmers, lost harvests — all on top of a debilitating plant disease called citrus greening and a long-term national decline in orange juice consumption.

“Significant is not the right word,” said Shannon Shepp, the executive director of the growers’ group Florida Department of Citrus, describing the damage to Florida’s orange juice industry. “It’s somewhere between …

Read the Rest>>

Justin Fletcher, a Church of Lord Jesus member, is anointed with oil as Nancy Kennedy whirls in a trance at a church in West Virginia.
Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

America is a Christian nation: this much has always been a political axiom, especially for conservatives. Even someone as godless and immoral as the 45th president feels the need to pay lip service to the idea. On the Christian Broadcasting Network last year, he summarized his own theological position with the phrase: “God is the ultimate.”

And in the conservative mind, American Christianity has long been hitched to whiteness. The right learned, over the second half of the 20th century, to talk about this connection using abstractions like “Judeo-Christian values”, alongside coded racial talk, to let voters know which side they were on.

But change is afoot, and US demographics are morphing with potentially far-reaching consequences. Last week, in a report …

Read the Rest>>

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has been outspoken against abortion.
Credit: Gabriel Bouys

The rapid growth of Catholic-affiliated hospitals in the U.S. could significantly reduce access to inpatient sterilization procedures, according to a new study that examines the rising influence of religion on reproductive health services.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimates that Catholic hospitals reduce the per-bed annual rates of inpatient abortions by 30 percent, and tubal ligations, or sterilization, by 31 percent.

Those impacts are being magnified by rapid consolidation among hospitals nationwide, a trend that resulted in a 22 percent increase in Catholic-sponsored or Catholic-affiliated hospitals between 2001 and 2016. The study found that the restrictions on reproductive health services at those facilities translates to more than 9,500 fewer tubal ligations per year.

“This alone represents a substantial cost to women, who must subsequently …

Read the Rest>>

An extensive survey by two former Australian priests says mandatory celibacy has been and remains the major risk factor for child sexual abuse and warns of an impending wave of abuse cases in India and Italy, which have a significant proportion of the Church’s remaining 9500 orphanages.

Professor Des Cahill and Dr Peter Wilkinson, in their 384-page survey entitled ‘Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports’, also found that a lack of the feminine and the denigration of women within Church structures was one key, underlying risk factor in abuse.

The survey, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, found that the response of bishops to clerical abuse across the world had been “remarkably uniform”.

“The bishops worked strenuously to keep the problem of clerical child sexual abuse in-house in order to …

Read the Rest>>

NAGS HEAD, NOTH CAROLINA — All along the coast of the southeast United States, the real estate industry confronts a hurricane. Not the kind that swirls in the Atlantic, but a storm of scientific information about sea-level rise that threatens the most lucrative, commission-boosting properties.

These studies warn that Florida, the Carolinas and other southeastern states face the nation’s fastest-growing rates of sea level rise and coastal erosion — as much as 3 feet by the year 2100, depending on how quickly Antarctic ice sheets melt. In a recent report, researchers for Zillow estimated that nearly 2 million U.S. homes could be literally underwater by 2100, if worst-case projections become reality.

This is not good news for people who market and build waterfront houses. But real estate lobbyists aren’t going down without a fight. Some are teaming up with climate change skeptics and small government advocates to block public …

Read the Rest>>

The Orange Park Performing Arts Academy in Orange Park, Florida, on August 15, 2017, the day it opened as a private school. It was previously a public charter school, but after it received two failing grades from the state, its charter contract was terminated.
Credit: Charlotte Kesl/ ProPublica

This past June, Florida’s top education agency delivered a failing grade to the Orange Park Performing Arts Academy in suburban Jacksonville for the second year in a row. It designated the charter school for kindergarten through fifth grade as the worst public school in Clay County, and one of the lowest performing in the state.

Two-thirds of the academy’s students failed the state exams last year, and only a third of them were making any academic progress at all. The school had had four principals in three years, and teacher turnover was high, too.

“My fourth grader was learning stuff that my …

Read the Rest>>