The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that's a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
"And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," he said.
The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About
Jehovah's Witnesses ordered to pay $13.5m to victim of sexual abuse
A Californian judge has ordered the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $13.5m to a man who was sexually abused in the 1980s by a church leader, the attorney for the victim said on Friday.
Church elders had assigned a man to work with Jose Lopez on Bible studies, even though they knew he had admitted to molesting another boy in 1982, because they felt he was “repentant”, Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, said.
Suicide surpassed war as the military's leading cause of death
War was the leading cause of death in the military nearly every year between 2004 and 2011 until suicides became the top means of dying for troops in 2012 and 2013, according to a bar chart published this week in a monthly Pentagon medical statistical analysis journal.
For those last two years, suicide outranked war, cancer, heart disease, homicide, transportation accidents and other causes as the leading killer, accounting for about three in 10 military deaths each of those two years.
Ozone hole remains size of North America, Nasa data shows
The Antarctic ozone hole, which was expected to reduce in size swiftly when manmade chlorine emissions were outlawed 27 years ago, is stubbornly remaining the size of North America, new data from Nasa suggests.
The hole in the thin layer of gas, which helps shield life on Earth from potentially harmful ultraviolet solar radiation that can cause skin cancers, grows and contracts throughout the year but reached its maximum extent on 9 September when monitors at the south pole showed it to cover 24.1m square km (9.3m sq miles). This is about 9% below the record maximum in 2000 but almost the same as in 2010, 2012 and 2013.
Republican ISIL fear-mongering amplifies extremists' message, experts say
In one frame of the video, a masked fighter for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) brandishes a knife, with a beheaded American journalist just beyond view. In another, the Mosque of the Prophet Jonah disappears into a cloud of dust. A crowd of masked gunmen hold Kalashnikovs aloft. Dramatic music plays in the background.
But this isn’t a recruitment video for ISIL. It’s a campaign ad for Allen Weh, who is running against Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., in the Nov. 4 midterm elections.
Alex Baer: Armageddon Out of Here
Money makes decisions Sanity never would. Fear, too. This adage applies to an awful lot of things, most of them pretty awful -- like politics and Ebola. These are awful and also awe-filled, but not in a good way. The critical difference between politics and Ebola? It's possible to somewhat survive devastating, ignorant decisions by the country in politics, even Bush-league decisions. Ebola, on the other hand, starts at death, and goes downhill from there.
Both are bad systems, way out of control. Both operate in a wide range, anywhere from figuratively to literally lethal. Both score lower than body lice in approval ratings. Both clog up your TVs and radios. Plus, there are more similarities at fighting the two than you might first think.
Pro Publica: The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster
n 2012, two massive storms pounded the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks.
Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job. They were wrong.
Hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil from BP spill may be on the ocean floor
Over 5 million barrels of oil was released into the ocean during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and up to 620,000 barrels may now be on the ocean floor, a new study finds.
The study, done by geochemists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looked at sediment samples from the Gulf of Mexico and located evidence of the chemical Hopane, which indicates the presence of crude oil. It was known that 2 million barrels of the 5 million barrels spilled had not been collected, and the researchers determined between 4 and 31 percent of the 2 million barrels has reached the ocean floor.
Nobel Peace Laureates write Obama on torture
The White House confirmed Monday that it has received a letter from 12 Nobel Peace Laureates calling on the U.S. to disclose torture methods allegedly used by American forces following the 9/11 terror attacks on the U.S.
Bernadette Meehan, National Security Council Spokesperson, told CNN "The President believes that the former rendition, detention, and interrogation program was inconsistent with our values as a nation and that public scrutiny, debate, and transparency will help to inform the public's understanding of the program to ensure that such a program will never be used again."
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