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Housing shortages are plunging New York City and Los Angeles into crisis. Affordable rents are scarce. Families are doubling up. Shelters are jam-packed. And over 100,000 people are sleeping sprawled on the streets of these two cities. The waitlist for public housing is over four years long in LA and staggering 10 years in New York. These lists would be even longer if public officials hadn't closed them to any new applicants. Nationwide, an estimated 32,000 public households are being taken up by illegal immigrants. It's a powerful reason why the Trump administration is giving illegals 18 months to get...

NEW YORK, May 3 (C-Fam) Sex-selective abortion has caused the premature death of over 23 million females, according to the first-ever systematic global study of sex ratio imbalance. Demographers have noted the phenomenon of skewed sex ratios for decades. Millions of females are missing because of sex-selective abortion. This has led to increased trafficking in children and women. It has also led to increased rates of suicide, depression, and substance abuse among unmarried men. But the global scale of the phenomenon and how many girls exactly have been aborted has relied on uncertain estimates. Now, for the first time, demographers...

Melissa Grimes works on a stenographer machine at Lowndes County Courthouse on Thursday. She has worked as court reporter for 16 years. Mississippi is working to combat a critical shortage of court reporters entering the field with more awareness and recruiting programs. Photo by: Deanna Robinson/Dispatch Staff  Slim SmithDecember 1, 2018 10:04:48 PM   In college athletics, the biggest factor in success is recruiting.   But attracting talented people is not confined to the world of college sports, and when it comes to the field of court reporting, the inability to recruit people to the profession is reaching a near crisis...

Wanted: truck drivers. Amid an otherwise strong corporate earnings environment, cost inflation within the trucking and freight industry is becoming a real concern for many companies. "It's a real bear," Tyson Foods (TSN - Get Report) CEO Tom Hayes told TheStreet about the inflationary pressures of the shortage. Approximately 60,000 drivers are needed to meet robust demand for trucking services, and that may be a conservative estimate. The shortage could be upwards of 100,000 or more, Seaport Global Securities LLC analyst Kevin Sterling told TheStreet. The driver shortage stems from several factors, according to Sky Harbor's Director of Research Michael...

Europe is the midst of a severe CO2 (carbon dioxide) shortage. One result is a shortage of dry ice, which impacts an airlines’ ability to offer ice cream onboard. Now, airlines like United have been forced to suspend ice cream sundae service on flights out of London. Without getting too technical or boring you to death, most CO2 used for food-processing is created in ammonia plants in Europe. These plants are predominantly in the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands and France. The biggest use for CO2 is in fertilizers, with demand peaking during the cooler months. Consequently, many plants shut...

The sole electricity plant in the Gaza Strip stopped working Thursday because of a lack of fuel, officials said, as concerns grew over worsening humanitarian conditions in the Hamas-controlled area. The closure of the plant, which normally provides around a fifth of Gaza's electricity, will exacerbate an already critical power shortage. Gaza's two million residents receive only around four hours of mains electricity a day, a situation for which they blame Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas leaders enjoy electricity 24 hours a day. However, they refuse to invest international aid monies in infrastructure for Gaza's residents, preferring instead to...

(CNN)Cape Town -- a city once at the forefront of Africa's green movement -- implemented new emergency water restrictions Thursday as the sprawling metropolis prepares for the day its taps run dry. (Emphasis added.) Residents are now being asked to curb the amount of municipal water they use each day to just 50 liters (a little over 13 gallons). Only a month ago, level six restrictions had placed residents on a daily allowance of 87 liters (about 23 gallons), illustrating the severity of the looming crisis. Officials estimate that if water levels continue to fall as expected, South Africa's second...

Investing.com – The number of housing starts and building permits issued in the U.S. unexpectedly tumbled in May, dampening optimism over the health of the U.S. housing sector, official data showed Friday. In a report, the U.S. Commerce Department said that housing starts decreased by 5.5% from the month before to hit a seasonally adjusted 1.092 million units last month from April’s total of 1.156 million units, a downward revision from the initial 1.172 million. Analysts had expected May’s reading to rise 4.1% from the prior month’s initial reading to 1.215 million. Meanwhile, the number of building permits issued declined...

Head of the Federal Agency for Labor, Frank-Jürgen Weise has said that new migrants and asylum seekers have little chance of filling Germany’s skilled worker problem because very few of them meet the needed qualifications. Frank-Jürgen Weise has had a long career in the German government and is now retiring at the age of 65. Mr Weise, who also briefly managed the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) admits that despite the unemployment rate being lower than when he first took office as head of the Labour agency, migrants will not be able to meet the increasing demand for...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it possesses a “limited amount” of 9mm bullets for agents in the field as well as for training purposes, and it is rationing its ammunition based on internal requests until it can award a new contract. [ ] The apparent role poor planning, or another agenda, played in the issue came to light when ICE said it would have run out of 9mm ammo by June 2017 in the absence of a modified contract with its supplier, Vista Outdoor Inc. So, the agency last month approved a $363,307 ceiling increase to contract No. HSCEMS-11-D-00002....

On the morning of Sept. 9, an inspector with the Alabama Surface Mining Commission was performing a routine monthly check of an old coal mine in Shelby County when he noticed "a strong odor of gasoline" as well as a sheen on the surface of one of the retention ponds. The gasoline he was smelling came from Colonial Pipeline's Line 1, an underground pipeline three feet in diameter that normally pushes 1.3 million barrels of gasoline per day from refineries in Houston to distribution centers across the Southeast and along the eastern seaboard. That 36-inch line, built in 1963, has...

Tyler Durden September 17, 2016 As Native Americans protesters face arrest in North Dakota for blocking the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, TheAntiMedia's Carey Wedler reports a gasoline pipeline spill is currently unfolding in the South. The leak has prompted Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal to declare states of emergency. The Colonial Pipeline, which runs from Houston to New York, began leaking on September 9, spilling 250,000 gallons of gasoline, or 6,000 barrels. The pipeline was built in 1962, and the current leak in Helena, Alabama, is the largest one Colonial...

May 23 (Reuters) - The Venezuelan bottler of Coca-Cola has halted production of sugar-sweetened beverage due to a lack of sugar, a Coca-Cola Co spokeswoman said on Monday. Venezuela is in the midst of a deep recession, and spontaneous demonstrations and looting have become more common amid worsening food shortages, frequent power cuts and the world's highest inflation.

Venezuela's largest privately-owned beer company has stopped producing beer after running out of malted barley (or, more specifically, running out of foreign currency with which to buy malted barley). The company, Empresas Polar, stopped production yesterday—it warned last week that it would run out of malted barley by then. Polar is putting "your drunk uncle's favorite political forecast to the test," Francisco Toro of the Caracas Chronicles wrote. "You know the one I'm talking about, right? That one uncle of yours who gets drunk at every family gathering and starts to rant about how the only way we're going to...

The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see.

Primary-care shortage is growing especially acute in rural areas and in parts of some cities. The doctor is disappearing in America. And by most projections, it’s only going to get worse — the U.S. could lose as many as 1 million doctors by 2025, according to a Association of American Medical Colleges report. Primary-care physicians will account for as much as one-third of that shortage, meaning the doctor you likely interact with most often is also becoming much more difficult to see. Tasked with checkups and referring more complicated health problems to specialists, these doctors have the most consistent contact...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd9fcPeE3RU

So, one of Planned Parenthood’s Northwest affiliates is looking for a nurse practitioner or certified nurse midwife to provider “reproductive health services,” including chemical or “medication” abortions, to a ‘broad-based population” in Vancouver, Washington, and Salem, Bend, and Milwaukie, Oregon. Rarely do stories come along that capture so many of the hot trends, but the fear is that this may only be the first. Doctors quitting the abortion business leading to a national shortage of abortionists. Check. The industry looks to non-physicians to fill in the shortage. Check. Using chemical abortions to bring abortion to more lightly staffed, under-equipped offices....

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

**SNIP** Bourbon’s popularity has surged ever since the amber liquor became a star of Mad Men. Magazines such as GQ and Bon Appétit have devoted pages to articles on bourbon cocktails. The Manhattan and Old Fashioned have become fashionable again. President Barack Obama recently proposed a “Bourbon Summit” with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. “Whiskey has gone away from being seen as an old man drink,” says Mahesh Patel, a structural engineer who owns 4,000 bottles of whiskey and sponsors an annual tasting conference in Las Vegas. Sales of bourbon are growing at a dizzying rate. Domestic sales of Kentucky-made bourbon...