IHT Rendezvous: Environmental Warning Fatigue Sets in

Record levels of industrial smog? A dwindling number of fish in the world’s oceans? A 4° Celsius warming in global temperatures by the end of the century?

How about environmental warning fatigue?

Global concern for major environmental issues is at an all time low, according to the results of a global poll of more than 22,000 people in 22 countries, released earlier this week.

“Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever — but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out,” said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan, the company that carried out the study.

While respondents clearly still had grave environmental concerns, fewer people were “very concerned” about various environmental issues than at any point in the last 20 years. The sharpest decrease in global concern occurred over the last two years.

The issue of climate change, which 49 percent of respondents rated last year as “very serious” was the only exception to the general trend. Pollsters found that there was less concern between 1998 and 2003 than today.

Shortages of fresh water and water pollution were the highest global concern, with 58 percent of the respondents marking it as “very serious.”

Respondents were asked to rate seven different environmental issues – from climate change to loss of biodiversity – as being either a “very serious problem,” “somewhat serious problem,” “not very serious problem” or “not a serious problem at all.”

The latest numbers were gathered last summer in telephone and face-to-face interviews with participants in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Join our sustainability conversation. Do you take the environmental issues more seriously now than in the past? Do you find yourself tuning out?

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Bonnie Franklin Played Struggling Everymom to Perfection, Says PEOPLE's Critic

By Tom Gliatto

03/02/2013 at 09:00 AM EST

Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli

CBS/Getty

When certain television stars pass away, they don't leave the stage – they leave your life. They played ordinary people so perfectly, you almost imagine that once their series concluded they went on living a plain existence parallel to yours as you worked, shopped, ate dinner, watched TV.

Actress Bonnie Franklin, who died of pancreatic cancer Friday at age 69, was for nine seasons America's most contemporary everymom on CBS's One Day at a Time (1975-1984). Franklin played Ann Romano, a divorced mother of two daughters (Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips) living in an apartment in Indianapolis.

Ann was cute but not pretty, youthful but not young, reasonable but not wise, optimistic but not deluded. You could have summed her up as pixieish, except she seemed too worn out to leap. Or maybe she'd need a minute to rev herself up.

Raising the girls and hoping for love, she seemed to understand that victories, as the title suggested, were achieved only incrementally.

There aren't many other sitcom performances that live on in the memory for such frank, simple concreteness. The show, for me, can be reduced almost entirely to close-ups of Franklin's watchful face, framed by her red page cut – and her expression is more anxious than amused.

Over the course of the show, there was plenty to be anxious about. One Day was developed by the legendary Norman Lear, who with All in the Family reformed the pastel-colored American sitcom into something not only set in a recognizably drab world but willing to grapple with hot-button topics like birth control and teen suicide. One Day dealt with both, and many more.

It's hard to be believe now, when TV sitcoms have become almost astonishingly inventive in constructing their comic situations, how essentially anguished such a show could be.

Which is why it's that face that I still see. That struggling but deserving woman, for whom everything is one day at a time.

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

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With record highs in sight, stocks face roadblocks

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If Wall Street needs to climb a wall of worry, it will have plenty of opportunity next week.

Major U.S. stock indexes will make another attempt at reaching all-time records, but the fitful pace that has dominated trading is likely to continue. Next Friday's unemployment report and the hefty spending cuts that look like they about to take effect will be at the forefront.

The importance of whether equities can reach and sustain those highs is more than Wall Street's usual fixation on numbers with psychological significance. Breaking through to uncharted territory is seen as a test of investors' faith in the rally.

"It's very significant," said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Alabama.

"The thinking is, there's just not enough there for an extended bull run," he said. "If we do break through (record highs), then maybe the charts and price action are telling us there's something better ahead."

Flare-ups in the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis and next Friday's report on the U.S. labor market could jostle the market, though U.S. job indicators have generally been trending in a positive direction.

Small- and mid-cap stocks hit lifetime highs in February. Now the Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> and the S&P 500 <.spx> are racing each other to the top. The Dow, made up of 30 stocks, is about 75 points - less than 1 percent - away from its record close of 14,164.53, which it hit on October 9, 2007. The broader S&P is still 3 percent away from its closing high of 1,565.15, also reached on October 9, 2007.

The advantage may be in the Dow's court. So far in 2013, it has gained 7.5 percent, beating the S&P 500 by about 1 percent.

THE RALLY AND THE REALITY CHECK

The Dow's relative strength owes much to its unique make-up and calculation, as well as to investors' recent preference for buying value stocks likely to generate steady reliable gains, rather than growth stocks.

But the more defensive stance illustrates how stock buyers are getting concerned about this year's rally. While investors don't want to miss out on gains, they're picking up companies that are less likely to decline as much as high-flying names - if a market correction comes.

The Russell Value Index <.rav> is up 7.6 percent for the year so far, outpacing the Russell Growth Index's <.rag> 5.7 percent rise. Within the realm of the S&P 500, the consumer staples sector led the market in February, gaining 3.1 percent.

There is some concern that growth-oriented names are being eclipsed by defensive bets, said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati.

"This isn't a be-all and end-all sell signal by any means, but we would feel much more comfortable if some of the more aggressive areas, like technology and small caps, would start to gain some leadership here," Detrick said.

Signs that investors are becoming concerned about the rally's pace is evident in the options market, where the ratio of put activity to call activity has recently shifted in favor of puts, which represent expectations for a stock to fall.

"We are seeing some put hedging in the financials, building up for the past month," said Henry Schwartz, president of options analytics firm Trade Alert in New York.

The put-to-call ratio representing an aggregate of about 562 financial stocks is 1:1, when normally, calls should be outnumbering puts.

Investors have no shortage of reasons to crave the relative safety of blue chips and defensive stocks. Although markets have mostly looked past uncertainty over Washington's plans to cut the deficit, fiscal policy negotiations still pose a risk to equities.

The $85 billion in spending cuts set to begin on Friday is expected to slow economic growth this year if policymakers do not reach a new deal. Markets so far have held firm despite the wrangling in Washington, but tangible economic effects could pinch stock prices going forward.

The International Monetary Fund warned that full implementation of the cuts would probably take at least 0.5 percentage point off U.S. growth this year.

EASY MONEY AND TEPID HIRING

Investors will also take in a round of economic data at a time when concerns are percolating that the market is being pushed up less by fundamentals and more by loose monetary policy around the world.

The main economic event will be Friday's non-farm payrolls report for February. The U.S. economy is expected to have added 160,000 jobs last month, only a tad higher than in January, in a sign the labor market is healing at a slow pace. The U.S. unemployment rate is forecast to hold steady at 7.9 percent.

While lackluster data has been a catalyst in the past for stock market gains as investors bet it would ensure continued stimulus from the Federal Reserve, that sentiment may be wearing thin.

Markets stumbled last week following worries that the Fed might wind down its quantitative easing program sooner than expected.

"It shows the underpinning of the market is being driven at this point by monetary policy," Hellwig said.

With investors questioning what is behind the rally, it will make a run to record highs even more significant, Hellwig added.

"There's smart people that are in the bull camp and the bear camp and the muddle-through camp," Hellwig said. "The fact that you can statistically, using historical evidence, make a case for going higher, lower, or staying the same makes this number very important this time around."

(Wall St Week Ahead runs every Friday. Comments or questions on this column can be emailed to: leah.schnurr(at)thomsonreuters.com)

(Reporting by Leah Schnurr; Additional reporting by Doris Frankel in Chicago; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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At War Blog: Remembering a Silent Success in Afghanistan

December in the mountains of southern Afghanistan greeted me and my men with strong and seemingly endless gusts of wind. The frigid temperatures were equally unforgiving. Our living quarters were constructed out of cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting, which didn’t create much of an escape. The highlight of my day, despite the obvious threat, was leading patrols as a squad leader. The physical activity kept me comfortably warm and allowed me to distance my mind from our frosty reality.

Despite daily patrols, it took me a few months to build rapport with the residents of Kunjak in Helmand Province. During the first month of my deployment in 2010, barely any villagers talked to me. This is when my interpreter, who we called H.B., suggested I start inviting the elders to our base for a meeting, or shura. He assured me this would build a mutual trust.

Soon, my Sunday mornings consisted of two to three hours of conversing with dozens of village elders. At 9 a.m., my interpreter and I would greet them as they climbed the steep and sandy hill to my remote outpost. To present a less hostile environment, I chose to meet them without my body armor or weapon.

We sat outside, suffering in the wind together. My interpreter would make chai, but I always brewed a pot of Starbucks coffee and offered some to my guests. Some liked it, some didn’t. I would like to think my generosity was appreciated.

The shuras were full of requests for new wells and mosques. But if there are two things Afghanistan has a plethora of, it’s those two things. I chose to propose something different, which thrilled them all.

We would build a school.

The Taliban had prevented them from being able to send their kids to school for years. With one suggestion, I had won over the villagers.

As the sun rose the following day, despite not having a school yet, I had over a dozen children waiting outside my base. Many had traveled from afar to attend what they thought was the first day of class. The last thing I wanted to do was send the children away. We invited them on the base, and H.B. taught them the Pashtu alphabet on our dry-erase board. It was on that Monday morning I realized I had to do something fast.

Our supplies were stored in a small tent at the back of our outpost, but I made the decision to move the tent to the base of our hill to serve as the school. By positioning it there, we could maintain its security, protecting it from Taliban attacks.

At 8:45 every morning, my Marines patrolled the school and used our metal detectors to sweep for improvised explosive devices. The safety of the children had to be paramount or our efforts would be for nothing. As the days passed, a growing number of children ranging in the age from 4 to 10 arrived for school. Within weeks we were teaching more than 40 boys and girls. During our time in Afghanistan, not a single child was injured at our school, and for the last four months of my deployment, the school was a giant success.

The Afghan National Police officers attached to my outpost did not participate much in the security of the school. In fact, many of them disapproved of it because it catered to girls as well as boys. I fear that as the American military presence draws down in Afghanistan, initiatives like our school will be abandoned by the Afghan government or destroyed by the Taliban. While the district mayor of Musa Qala knew of our efforts at the school, we received little to no local government support. Requests for a teacher, supplies and a permanent structure were either ignored or forgotten.

Stories like the one of our school tend to never make the limelight. Far too often the news is only about the horrors of war, or mistakes made by NATO troops, rather than their successes. It is easy to focus on the negative, especially as the United States plans to withdraw most of its forces by the end of 2014.

As I left Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, dozens of Afghans were attending our shuras, and they were full of varying requests. They no longer asked for wells and mosques. Now they wanted a community center and a larger school. I left before I could make those dreams come true for them. But I hoped the Marines who relieved me would be able to fulfill them.

I came home and listened and watched the news a lot. I kept hoping I would see or hear something good from Afghanistan. To no avail; the stories were depressing. After spending seven months in Afghanistan, I now knew good things were happening, but they just weren’t being shown.

I hope that my school wasn’t short-lived, and I would like to think that it is still operating safely. Whether it is or not, I still fondly remember our efforts. They led to one of the silent successes that have happened and, I believe, will continue to happen in Afghanistan.

Thomas James Brennan is a military affairs reporter with the Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. Before being medically retired this fall, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Follow him on Twitter at @thomasjbrennan.

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William Shatner Is New Boston Red Sox Umpire - in a Music Video

By Andrea Billups

03/01/2013 at 10:55 AM EST

The captain of the Enterprise has landed behind home plate at Boston's venerable Fenway Park.

William Shatner, 81, is no stranger to kooky parody, from his recent Oscar cameo to his Priceline.com ads. Now, he'll portray a home plate umpire for the Boston Red Sox in a baseball–inspired video for crooner Brian Evans. See the trailer below.

"It's my fantasy, my field of dreams," Evans, 42, said in a press release of the campy video for the song, "At Fenway," produced by Narada Michael Walden. "Shatner as the home plate umpire is as iconic as the ballpark itself."

Evans' mother, Helen Bousquet, also stars in the video along with car magnate Ernie Boch Jr. who plays the Red Sox manager. The video has the blessing of Major League Baseball as well as the Red Sox management.

It marked Shatner's first trip to Fenway park. Ever.

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WHO: Slight cancer risk after Japan nuke accident

LONDON (AP) — Two years after Japan's nuclear plant disaster, an international team of experts said Thursday that residents of areas hit by the highest doses of radiation face an increased cancer risk so small it probably won't be detectable.

In fact, experts calculated that increase at about 1 extra percentage point added to a Japanese infant's lifetime cancer risk.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

The report was issued by the World Health Organization, which asked scientists to study the health effects of the disaster in Fukushima, a rural farming region.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the Fukushima plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water. The most exposed populations were directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, which is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

In the report, the highest increases in risk are for people exposed as babies to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

The WHO report estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare and one of the most treatable cancers when caught early. A woman's normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That number would rise by 0.5 under the calculated increase for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected cancer risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most contaminated areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected with the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who also had no role in developing the new report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the United Nations health agency of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally grown food.

Some restrictions have been lifted on a 12-mile (20-kilometer) zone around the nuclear plant. But large sections of land in the area remain off-limits. Many residents aren't expected to be able to return to their homes for years.

Kanno accused the report's authors of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

__

Online:

WHO report: http://bit.ly/YDCXcb

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At War Blog: Group Seeks Out and Helps Homeless Veterans

Combat zones exist in many different places. For Joe Leal, the founder of the Vet Hunters Project, an all-volunteer group of veterans who have made it their mission to track down homeless comrades, the battlefield is a lone soldier living in his truck in the wake of a home foreclosure, or a veteran living in a dark, deafening homeless encampment secreted under a freeway.

“You know the expression ‘never leave the fallen behind’?” Mr. Leal said one recent afternoon, barreling down the highway in his typical style after spending the morning on the phone calming a distraught vet. “Homelessness is the equivalent of leaving a buddy on the battlefield. They’re heroes in the shadows.”

The group, which takes an aggressive “911 attitude” to homelessness, fans out to America’s forgotten places — bridge underpasses, dry river beds, bus stop shelters, even the concrete pads of subdivision houses that were never built. Started in 2010, the “vetwork,” as Mr. Leal likes to call it, now has 20 chapters around the country, with 113 active volunteers in California alone, who subsidize the work out of their own pockets. In an article Thursday, I write about the project’s work to with homeless female veterans, who are going without housing at higher rates than male veterans.

Among the ranks of the project’s volunteers are military families with spare housing and deployed soldiers who make their empty homes available to homeless vets while they are away.

Mr. Leal, who is something of a human Eveready battery, started the project in memory of his friend Master Sgt. Kelly Bolor, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2003. He and Mr. Leal served together in Iraq, where Sgt. Bolor, who was of Hawaiian descent, “would pull out his ukulele and sing to us when we were down,” Mr. Leal recalled.

Mr. Leal has had his own brush with homelessness, living in shelters with his family as a child — often separated due to restrictions on children — and then in public housing in Ontario, outside Los Angeles. “I watched my father do his best to make sure everything was O.K.,” Mr. Leal said of David Jimenez, the stepfather who raised him. Mr. Jimenez was killed by a hit-and-run driver when Mr. Leal was 25 years old.

Mr. Leal orchestrates much of the project out of the 115th Combat Service Support Battalion in South El Monte, where he is a reservist. “Soldiers won’t tell you their problems,” Master Sgt. Barry Marshall observed of the challenges of reaching homeless veterans. “It’s suck it up and drive on.”

Although the project encourages homeless veterans to seek help with the Department of Veterans Affairs, it can act on a moment’s notice, Mr. Leal said, because he and his cohorts have established relationships with city and county agencies serving the homeless as well as community organizations.

When the husband of one of their clients, Monica Figueroa, returned from multiple deployments, including Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, the couple wound up homeless, living with their son amid oil and solvents in an auto-body shop owned by his family. They called Mr. Leal, who found them an apartment through Inland Temporary Homes, a community organization in San Bernardino that provides temporary housing and support services for homeless families.

First Sgt. Steve Kreider, now a reserve adviser stationed at the Middletown, Conn., Reserve Center, was one the project’s first volunteers. He participated in a cross-country bike ride in 2011 that was a fact-finding mission and an effort to raise public awareness. “That really opened up our eyes,” Sergeant Kreider said. “You think this only happens in New York or Los Angeles. But when you get to Kansas and see a homeless vet, you realize ‘holy moly,’ this is a bigger problem. It’s a travesty.”

The project helps out with official homeless counts, including one for the state of Connecticut and another for greater Los Angeles. In a count in Connecticut last February, accomplished with the help of 70 cadet volunteers from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the group located 25 homeless veterans. “They often won’t have a photo I.D.,” Sergeant Kreider observes. “But if you ask them for their DD214, their honorable discharge order, 90 percent of the time they’ll have it. It’s a matter of pride.”

Thus far, the project is financed by the volunteers themselves, operating on a budget of some $50,000. Mr. Leal has about 2,000 volunteers and counting, enlisting even nonveterans living in homeless encampments in the cause. The group will sometimes intervene with car payments, traffic tickets, medication and other aspects of daily life that can sometimes become tipping points into homelessness.

“We don’t accept defeat, ma’am,” he explained after a characteristically long day in the field. “That’s not an option.”

Related Story: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home

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Tamera Mowry-Housley: Let Post-Baby Body Pressure Go

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/27/2013 at 04:00 PM ET

Scott Kirkland/Picturegroup

Stunning in a white dress by Black Halo, Tamera Mowry-Housley returned to the red carpet Thursday for the first time since delivering son Aden in November.

“I have all of these curves I didn’t have before,” the new mom — with twin sister Tia Mowry-Hardrict by her side at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards Luncheon – tells PEOPLE. ”I wanted to show them off!”

However, she admits her new figure did take some getting used to.

“When I see people like Claire Danes and Megan Fox I think, ‘My body won’t do that!’ My boobs are in my face, I have stretch marks,” Mowry-Housley, 34, says of the post-baby bodies of her fellow actresses.

“There’s a lot of pressure, but you just have to just let it go.”

Adds a Rachel Roy-clad Mowry-Hardrict, “After I had my son [Cree, 20 months], I looked at women like that and I questioned myself. I couldn’t understand how people were on a beach in a bikini two months after they had a baby. I went to my OB-GYN because I thought something was wrong with me. I decided to look up to women like Pink instead. She took her time.”

One of Mowry-Housley’s tricks to feeling more comfortable is channeling Christina Hendricks. “She’s a woman who knows how to show off her curves in a very positive and beautiful way,” she notes.

“My husband [Adam Housley] keeps telling me to own my curves because he thinks it’s sexy,” adds Mowry-Housley. “I just birthed a human being and that was hard, so I am enjoying this. I want to represent a normal woman who just had a baby. This is who I am.”

– Jessica Herndon

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US economy grew at 0.1 percent rate in 4th quarter

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy grew at a 0.1 percent annual rate from October through December, the weakest performance in nearly two years. But economists believe a steady housing rebound, stronger hiring and solid spending by consumers and businesses are pushing economic growth higher in the current quarter.

The Commerce Department's second estimate of fourth-quarter growth was only slightly better than its initial estimate that the economy shrank at a rate of 0.1 percent. And it was well below the 3.1 percent growth rate reported for the July-September quarter.

The revision to the gross domestic product was due to higher exports and more business investment. GDP is the broadest measure of the economy's output.

Many economists say temporary factors that held back growth in the fourth quarter are probably fading and growth is likely picking up in the January-March quarter.

Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, predicts growth could be as high as 2 percent in the current quarter despite higher Social Security taxes, which have reduced take-home pay for most Americans. Alan Levenson, chief economist for T. Rowe Price, said growth could be as high as 2.5 percent.

Ashworth noted that a sharp decline in defense spending and slower business restocking subtracted 2.9 percentage points from growth in the fourth quarter. At the same time, consumer spending and business investment — two key drivers of growth — accelerated at the end of last year.

"We still believe that the fourth-quarter GDP figures were a lot better than the headline stagnation suggests," said Ashworth.

The economy could continue to struggle if policymakers in Washington cannot reach agreements over the budget his month, including billions of dollars in spending cuts that are set to begin on Friday. And a spike in gas prices and higher taxes could hold back consumer spending.

Still, a raft of recent reports suggests that many aspects of the economy are improving.

The Labor Department said that the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 22,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 344,000. The steep decline comes as hiring has strengthened, providing more income to consumers.

Employers have added an average of 200,000 jobs per month in the past three months. That's up from an average of 150,000 in the previous three months.

More jobs and ultra-low mortgage rates are helping the once-battered housing market recover. New-home sales jumped 16 percent to their highest level in 4 ½ in January.

At the same time, the number of new homes available for sale remains near record lows. That means builders will likely have to start construction on more homes and apartments to keep up with demand. That should create more construction jobs.

Home prices also rose in December compared with the same month a year ago by the most in more than six years. Rising home values also contribute to the housing recovery and the broader economy. They encourage more people to buy before prices rise further. Higher prices also build homeowners' wealth, which can spur more spending and economic growth.

Businesses and consumers are also showing greater confidence despite automatic spending cuts scheduled to take effect on Friday. A measure of consumer confidence rebounded in February after a sharp fall the previous month that likely was a result of the tax increase.

Companies, meanwhile, sharply increased orders in January for a category of long-lasting manufactured goods that reflect their investment plans. That suggests they are confident about their business prospects.

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