Homeless people settle in for the evening at a subway stop near the White House.

Many of the poorest people in the United States are still struggling to recover from the effects of a recession that ended six years ago, making them very vulnerable as the country stands on the brink of a new downturn.
In 2006, the latest year for which Census Bureau figures are available, 12.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty, compared with 11.7 percent in 2001, the year of the last recession, reported Reuters.
“It’s unusual in an economic recovery that ... we still have poverty higher than it was in the recession that preceded it,“ said Sharon Parrott, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank in Washington.
This shows the poor have largely missed out on the gains made when the economy was expanding, Parrott said. The recent expansion was “much stronger for the people at the top than for people at the bottom.“
Few places illustrate this more readily than Philadelphia.
Mattie McQueen, 43, put off paying her phone bill in December so she could afford a few Christmas treats for herself and her 1-year-old granddaughter, who lives with her.
“You’ve got to rob Paul to pay Peter,“ she said.
By holding on to the $162 that she owed the phone company, McQueen, a resident of South Philadelphia, was able to buy turkey, chicken, collard greens, and a few toys for her granddaughter, Mayliyah.
Without the budget adjustment, it would have been a cheerless Christmas dinner.

Below Poverty
McQueen, who is diabetic and unemployed, lives on welfare payments of $637 a month from the City of Philadelphia, another $102.50 every two weeks in supplementary social security for her granddaughter, and $89 a month in food stamps.
That adds up to an annual income a little over $11,000, well below the $13,690 set by the federal government as the official poverty level for a family of two.
She spends $319 a month on rent, $425 a month on groceries, and $60 for the phone. She says she can’t afford to use public transportation, and sometimes has to borrow money from family members to make ends meet. She has had help with child care from Episcopal Community Services, a church-based social services organization.
Formerly homeless and now living in public housing, McQueen would seem to be far removed from the worries of some more affluent people hit by the foreclosure crisis gripping the United States, people who bought their own homes in the last few years but now find they cannot afford the mortgage payments.
But the foreclosure crisis is making itself felt throughout the US economy and threatening to send the United States into recession, which is often defined as a decline in economic growth for two or more successive quarters.
That is bad news for poor people like McQueen and the other 354,000 people in Philadelphia--or 25.1 percent of the city’s population--who live at or below the official poverty line.
“Historically, when the economy falters and unemployment rises, we see an increase in poverty,“ Parrot said.
Predictions of a new recession mean that poverty rates are likely to start rising again without ever recovering to the level they were at during the last recession, which ended in November 2001.
Poverty advocates like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities note that two rounds of tax cuts by Congress during the administration of US President George W. Bush have failed to trickle down to the nation’s poor.
Philadelphia’s poverty rate, almost twice the national average, is the highest among the 10 largest US cities.

The public health impact of the government’s decision to downgrade cannabis is disclosed recently in official figures showing a 50- percent rise in the number of people requiring medical treatment after using the drug.
Since cannabis was downgraded from a Class B to a Class C drug, the number of adults being treated in hospitals and clinics in England for its effects has risen to more than 16,500 a year. In addition, the number of children needing medical attention after smoking the drug has risen to more than 9,200.
Almost 500 adults and children are treated in hospitals and clinics every week for the effects of cannabis, the Guardian reported.
Doctors say cannabis abuse can contribute to mental health problems including forms of psychosis, paranoia and schizophrenia. There can be harmful physical side-effects, disrupting blood pressure and exacerbating heart and circulation disorders.
Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, a leading campaigner on drug issues since her son, Nick Mills, killed himself in despair at his addiction four years ago, said: “These results are shocking and dreadful. What more evidence do you need? You cannot sweep this under the carpet any longer. Children have to be told of the dangers of this what is wrongly called a soft-drug. It is extremely dangerous and it is destroying healthy, young minds.“
James Clappison, a Conservative member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: “The reclassification of cannabis sent the wrong message and was clearly the wrong decision. These figures show the evident dangers of cannabis abuse and support the case for the drug being restored to Category B.“
Health authority figures show that 16,685 adults were treated by English hospital trusts after abusing cannabis in 2006-07. The previous year, it was 14,828--up from 11,057 in 2004-05.
The data also shows that the number of children treated for using cannabis has risen from 8,014 in 2005-06 to 9,259 last year. In total, 25,944 people were treated for cannabis use last year--around 498 a week. In addition, around 70,000 people are treated for mental disorder as outpatients each year.
Downgrading cannabis to a Class C drug placed it alongside steroids and some prescription anti-depressants.
Possession of them can lead to a two-year prison sentence, but charges are rarely brought against people found with small quantities of such drugs.

Fighting with your spouse can actually be good for your health with people who bottle it all up found to die earlier, a new study shows.
Researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and its Psychology Department released preliminary findings after 17 years of following 192 couples.
The couples fell into four categories: where both partners expressed anger when they felt unfairly attacked, where neither partner expressed their anger, and one category each for where the wife suppressed her feelings and where the husband did so, according to Reuters.
“I would say that if you don’t express your feelings to your partner and tell them what the problem is when you’re unfairly attacked, then you’re in trouble,“ said Ernest Harburg, lead author of the study, in an interview.
The study found that those who kept their anger in were twice as likely to die earlier than those who don’t.
There were 13 deaths in the group of 26 pairs where both partners suppressed their emotions, as opposed to only 41 deaths in the remaining 166 pairs.
“When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict,“ Harburg said.
“Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that’s fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict.“
Harburg said resentment was the real threat--and suppressing anger led to resentment.
He said it is the resentment that interacts with any medical vulnerabilities a person might have, increasing their chances of succumbing to that medical problem.
“It’s healthy to recognize that you’re being attacked unfairly and it’s even more healthy to speak up and to talk about it and try to resolve the problem if you want to live longer,“ said Harburg.

Technology might be just as addictive as alcohol and drugs and could also wreak havoc on personal and work relationships, a leading expert said.
John O’Neill, the director of addictions services at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, Texas refers to it as “technology overload“ when he sees addiction-like behavior in his patients using cell phones or emails.
“I think they share some of the same components as people who become addicted to alcohol and drugs in that we start to see that someone cannot really put it down and cannot stop the use of it even when there are some consequences,“ he said in a telephone interview, according to Reuters.
“We can become overloaded by technology and suffer consequences in our relationships,“ he added.
O’Neill’s observations are backed up by psychologists who have classified technology addiction as an impulse disorder that can be as socially damaging as alcoholism and drug addiction.
The Internet/Computer Addiction Services in Redmond, Washington, which runs treatment programs and provides therapy, estimate that 6 to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in the United States have a dependency on technology.
O’Neill said it’s all about teaching people how to manage their behavior in a healthy way.
“How do you learn to set limits, develop boundaries, how do you make some sense out of what does it mean to healthily use the technology, or to healthily enter into a relationship with someone,“ O’Neill said.
He added that warning signs that someone may be sliding into an unhealthy relationship with technology include using text messages, email and voice mail when face-to-face interaction would be more appropriate, or limiting time with friends and family to tend to your email, return phone calls or to surf the Internet.
An inability to leave home without a cell phone, to relax without constantly checking email or to stop using the Internet are also worrying signs.
When the Internet becomes a more powerful draw than spending time with family or friends, or when someone pays more attention to gadgets than what is happening in real life are more danger signs.

A view of Pirghar Waterfall near Shahr-e Kord in IranÕs Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari province, which froze during the recent unprecedented cold weather.

Work really can kill you, according to a study, providing the strongest evidence yet of how on-the-job stress raises the risk of heart disease by disrupting the body’s internal systems.
The findings from a long-running study involving more than 10,000 British civil servants also suggest stress-induced biological changes may play a more direct role than previously thought, said Tarani Chandola, an epidemiologist at University College London, Msnbc.com reported.
“This is the first large-scale population study looking at the effects of stress measured from everyday working life on heart disease,“ said Chandola, who led the study. “One of the problems is people have been skeptical whether work stress really affects a person biologically.“
Heart disease is the world’s leading cause of death. It is caused by fatty deposits that harden and block arteries, high blood pressure which damages blood vessels, and other factors.
The researchers measured stress among the civil servants by asking questions about their job demands such as how much control they had at work, how often they took breaks, and how pressed for time they were during the day.
The team conducted seven surveys over a 12-year period and found chronically stressed workers--people determined to be under severe pressure in the first two of the surveys--had a 68 percent higher risk of developing heart disease.
The link was strongest among people under 50, Chandola said.
“This study adds to the evidence that the work stress-coronary heart disease association is causal in nature,“ the researchers wrote in the European Heart Journal.
Behavior and biological changes likely explain why stress at work causes heart disease, Chandola said. For one, stressed workers eat unhealthy food, smoke, alcohol drink and skip exercise--all behaviors linked to heart disease.
In the study, stressed workers also had lowered heart rate variability--a sign of a poorly-functioning weak heart--and higher-than-normal levels of cortisol, a “stress“ hormone that provides a burst of energy for a fight-or-flight response.
Too much cortisol circulating in the blood stream can damage blood vessels and the heart, Chandola said.
“If you are constantly stressed out these biological stress systems become abnormal,“ Chandola said.

Beijing police have launched a campaign to clear the city’s streets of beggars to create a “civilized and sound“ environment for the August Olympic Games, state media reported.
Officers will patrol the city 24 hours a day, looking not just for beggars, but also peddlers, pamphlet distributors and tricycle taxi drivers who ply their trades without licenses, the Beijing Morning Post reported. “They’ll have nowhere to hide,“ the paper said.
“The campaign is aimed at uprooting illegal activities that tarnish the city’s image and affect the social order and to build up a ’harmonious, civilized and sound’ urban environment for the Olympic Games,“ said senior police official Yu Hongyuan.