Working hard and being employed may no longer be enough to ward off poverty, according to a study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and Brandeis University's Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The study finds that the U.S. has a large contingency of working poor who do not have sufficient resources to support their families at a minimum economic standard.
The future might be more promising, however. The study shows that new state policies are enabling more low-income households to move from poverty to the middle class by rewarding work effort, enhancing job-related earnings and providing ways to encourage the accumulation of assets such as savings and home ownership.
The study, Innovative State Policies to Reduce Poverty and Expand the Middle Class: Building Asset Security Among Low-Income Households, examines a new domestic policy framework called "asset building." The framework is based on the concept that helping people develop financial assets provides stability and an opportunity to move into the middle class.

American dream, in peril, is successfully pursued through state programs

Swaziland, with the world's highest rate of HIV, cut Aids day events, and South Africa's health minister publicly refused to back anti-retroviral drugs.
US President George W Bush pledged new funds and called for decisive action. The EU stressed the need for effective measures to prevent the disease.
More than 40m people are infected with HIV/Aids, according to the UN.
"The lessons of nearly 25 years into the Aids epidemic are clear. Investments made in HIV prevention break the cycle of new infections," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids.
"By making these investments, each and every country can reverse the spread of Aids."

Controversy clouds World Aids Day

Alert: Americans who honor the U.S. Constitution’s strict separation of church and state are now genuinely alarmed. Agnostics and atheists, as well as observant people of every faith, fear — sensibly — that the religious right is gaining historic political power, via an ultraconservative movement with highly placed friends.
But many of us feel helpless. We haven’t read the Founding Documents since school (if then). We lack arguing tools, “verbal karate” evidence we can cite in defending a secular United States.
For instance, such extremists claim — and, too often, we ourselves assume — that U.S. law has religious roots. Yet the Constitution contains no reference to a deity.
The Declaration

Fighting Words for a Secular America: Ashcroft & Friends vs. George Washington & the Framers

John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, has a bone to pick with Wikipedia.

In an op-ed in USAToday Seigenthaler takes the community-authored encyclopedia to task for running a biography of him that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
The charges remained up on the site for months before Seigenthaler got them removed. The claims were posted anonymously on the encyclopedia, and while he was able to trace the author's IP address to a customer of BellSouth Internet, the company said it would not disclose the name without a subpoena, Seigenthaler wrote.
"And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research--but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects," he wrote in the essay. "Congress has enabled them and protects them."

Wikipedia slander?