Insider Report
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Congressmen Rake In $608 an Hour
2. Married Couples Now a Minority in US
3. No Global Warming in 18 Years
4. France's Chief Rabbi Compares ISIS Victims to Holocaust
5. Minimum Wage Hike Would Benefit Few
6. 3 Million People Born in US Live in Another Country
1. Congressmen Rake In $608 an Hour
The U.S. House will be in session for only eight days during a 102-day span between August 1 and November 12, which means that based on their $174,000 annual salary, lawmakers will earn $608 an hour during those days in the nation's capital.
That figure was calculated by liberal activist Ralph Nader, assuming 10-hour workdays. He sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner on Monday, writing: "While millions of Americans are working more and more for less and less, you and your House of Representatives seem to have no problem working less and less for more and more."
The House took a five-week vacation from Washington on August 1 and returned on September 8. After two four-day workweeks, members left Washington again on September 18 and are not due to return until November 12 for a lame-duck session following the midterm elections.
Their hourly wage for the eight days is several times the hourly compensation of anesthesiologists, one of the country's highest-paid professions at an average of $113 an hour, The Hill reported.
The Senate took the same break in August and also worked just two weeks in September before leaving to campaign for the elections.
Legislators and their aides argue that time spent in Washington constitutes only part of their job, and they also spend considerable time meeting with and serving constituents in their home districts and states, The Hill noted.
But Nader said in an interview: "You are paid by the taxpayer to work in Congress at least a 40-hour week. If you want to do anything back home after that, that's discretionary time. They don't pay you to campaign for your re-election."
Even when they are in Washington, lawmakers devote much time to non-legislative matters. After the 2012 elections, new members of Congress were reportedly advised to set aside four hours a day for fundraising phone calls during their 10-hour workday.
Nader's letter comes in the wake of a Gallup poll showing that in August just 13 percent of Americans approved of the way Congress is handling its job, while 83 percent disapproved — and 53 percent said they "strongly disapprove."
The last time Congress' approval rating was over 50 percent in a Gallup poll was in April 2003, at 58 percent, during President George W. Bush's first term.
The approval rating stood at 84 percent in October 2001, immediately following the 9/11 attacks.
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2. Married Couples Now a Minority in US
Married couples have become a minority in the United States during the past few years, while those married pairs with children comprise just one in five households.
Married couples living together without children accounted for 29.1 percent of U.S. households in 2012, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. That's about the same as in 1970.
But married couples living together with children accounted for just 19.6 percent of households, down significantly from 1970 when the figure was 40.3 percent.
That means married couples living together, with or without children, accounted for 48.7 percent of households. In 1970, the figure was 70.6 percent. It dropped to 60.8 percent in 1980, to 56.1 percent in 1990, and 52.8 percent in 2000. Married couples were a minority in 2010, comprising just 49.7 percent of households.
In 2012, women living without a mate accounted for 15.2 percent of households, while men living without one comprised 12.3 percent. "Other family households" accounted for 17.8 percent, mostly unmarried couples living together, with or without children, and to a lesser extent married couples living apart.
The proportion of single-person households has risen from 16.2 percent in 1970 to 27.5 percent.
"Most of the increase in people living alone comes from men," Bloomberg Businessweek observed.
"In the 1970s, a man on his own was pretty rare, making up only about 5 percent of households. Now such households account for more than 12 percent."
The consistently decreasing percentage of Americans who are married is surely related to the rising percentage of U.S. babies born to unwed mothers. As the Insider Report disclosed last week, 36 percent of the generation of Americans born from 1993 through 2012, who are beginning to turn 21 this year, were born to an unmarried mother.
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3. No Global Warming in 18 Years
On September 21, an estimated 300,000-plus demonstrators turned out for the People's Climate March in New York City to call for international action against climate change.
Two days later, President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly and called on all countries to cut carbon emissions "right now."
And eight days after that, October 1, will mark 18 consecutive years without global warming.
There has been "no significant warming trend in surface average temperature" in those 18 years, said Patrick Michaels, director of the Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science.
Al Gore and other climate change alarmists will have to concede that their predictions of catastrophic global warming were off by a long shot, Michaels, who has a doctorate in ecological climatology, told CNS News.
"It has to be admitted eventually that too much warming was forecast too fast," he said. "This just has to happen. You can't go on and on and on.
"If the surface temperature resumed the warming rate that we observed from, say 1977 through 1998, we would still go close to a quarter of a century without significant net warming because there's such a long flat period built into the record now."
Michaels pointed to findings by the University of Illinois' Polar Ice Research Center that Antarctic ice "is at its highest extent measured by the current microwave satellite sounding system" since 1978.
"And if you take a close look at the Arctic data, it appears the decline [in polar ice] stopped around 2005/2006, which means we've almost had 10 years without any net loss in Arctic ice."
Michaels spent three decades as a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and was a contributing editor to the United Nations' second Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
He noted that in a survey earlier this year, global warming ranked No. 19 out of 20 issues that Americans consider top priorities — and contrasted that with Secretary of State John Kerry's recent proclamation that climate change is "the biggest challenge of all that we face right now."
Michaels told CNS: "I would say that his order of needs is a little bit out of whack."
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4. France's Chief Rabbi Compares ISIS Victims to Holocaust
French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia has compared ISIS militants to Nazis and likened Christians and other minorities they target to Holocaust victims.
His assertions follow disclosures in last week's Insider Report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found parallels between the efforts of militant Muslim groups like ISIS to establish Islam as the "master faith" and Nazis' claims to represent the "master race."
Korsia, who was elected by French Jews in June, spoke on September 21 at the Grand Synagogue in Paris at an event commemorating Holocaust victims.
"The situation of religious minorities all over the world and especially in the Middle East resonates, unfortunately, with our commemoration today," he said, according to a report from the French news agency AFP cited by the Jewish Daily Forward.
"As our parents wore the yellow star (as ordered by the Nazis to mark them as Jews), Christians are made to wear the scarlet letter of 'nun.'"
The letter “nun,” pronounced the same in both Hebrew and Arabic, equates to the Roman letter “N” and stands for Nazareen, an Arabic term signifying people from Nazareth, or Christians.
Militants with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have reportedly ordered Christians in ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq to wear the Arabic letter on their clothes.
ISIS jihadists are also said to be murdering Christians as well as Yazidis, a mostly Kurdish ethnic group.
"Hundreds of Yazidis were buried alive, their women sold as slaves," Korsia said. He added that he wished for "a more urgent reaction by European nations, by France, to the attack on our fundamental roots, like what happened during the Holocaust," and said he hoped "we don't arrive too late."
The Islamist militants' reign of terror hit home in France with Wednesday's appearance of an online video showing Algerian extremists allied with ISIS decapitating a French hostage.
In a speech commemorating the 9/11 attacks, Netanyahu said: "There's a master race; now there's a master faith. And that allows you to do anything to anyone, first of all to your own people and then to everyone else."
Adolf Hitler in his speeches and writings spread his beliefs in racial "purity" and in the superiority of the "Germanic race" — what he called an Aryan "master race."
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5. Minimum Wage Hike Would Benefit Few
Amid much talk about the dire need to raise the minimum wage in the United States, a government report discloses that just 2.6 percent of all wage and salary workers now earn the federal minimum wage or less.
Last year 1.53 million hourly workers earned the minimum of $7.25 an hour, which was raised from $6.55 in July 2009, according to the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But another 1.8 million were paid less than the minimum wage because they were in jobs where they could expect to receive additional income from tips or commissions, or were full-time students.
Many hourly workers receiving tips or commissions in fact earn more than the minimum wage, and a hike in the basic minimum wage wouldn't help them unless their minimums were raised as well.
In 1940, the minimum wage was set at $.25 an hour, but that translates to $3.40 in 2013 dollars, less than half of today's minimum.
Around 47 percent of the 3.33 million hourly workers at or below the federal minimum — 1.54 million — are in food-preparation and serving-related occupations, where in many cases tipping is common, and 14.5 percent or 477,000 are in sales and related occupations, where commissions can often be expected.
The BLS report also disclosed that about 5 percent of women who were paid hourly rates last year received the minimum wage or less, as did about 3 percent of men.
About 10 percent of hourly-paid workers age 16 and over without a high school diploma earned the federal minimum or less, compared to around 4 percent of those with a high school diploma and about 2 percent of college graduates.
And about 10 percent of part-time workers, who usually work fewer than 35 hours a week, received the federal minimum or less, compared to just 2 percent of full-time employees.
President Barack Obama created controversy earlier this year when he proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $9 and indexing it to inflation.
A recent study by the American Action Forum found that in 2013, a $1 increase in a state's minimum wage was associated with a 1.48 percent rise in unemployment, and a 4.67 percent rise in teenage unemployment.
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6. 3 Million People Born in US Live in Another Country
Last year 2,980,000 people who were born in the United States were living in other countries — by far the largest number in Mexico, a new report on world migration reveals.
According to the United Nations Population Division, an international migrant is someone who has been living for a year or longer in a country other than the one where he or she was born.
This would include foreign workers and international students, but not tourists, foreign-aid workers, temporary workers employed in another country for less than a year, and overseas military personnel.
The report from the Pew Research Center, based on U.N. figures, shows that 850,000 U.S.-born people were living in Mexico last year.
Far behind is Canada, where 320,000 U.S.-born people resided, followed by the United Kingdom (220,000), Germany (110,000), Australia (90,000), and Israel (80,000).
More than 40,000 were living in five other countries — South Korea, Italy, Japan, France, and Bangladesh. But there were less than 1,000 U.S.-born people living in more than 100 other nations and possessions around the world.
Examining the international migrant flows among other populous nations, there were 14.1 million people born in India who were living elsewhere (mostly in the United Arab Emirates, United States, and Saudi Arabia), and 9.3 million from China (United States, South Korea, Japan).
As far as people migrating to the United States, 45,790,000 people born in other countries were living in America last year.
The largest number came from Mexico, 12.95 million, ahead of China (2.25 million), India (2.06 million), Philippines (2 million), Vietnam (1.38 million), and El Salvador (1.37 million).
The Pew report also pointed out that the United Kingdom is home to the world's most diverse immigrant community, and emigrants from France live in more countries than emigrants from any other nation.
The United Arab Emirates has the highest share of foreign-born people — 84 percent of its population of 9.2 million — followed by Qatar (74 percent) and Kuwait (60 percent).
People in the most impoverished countries are least likely to emigrate, due largely to the lack of funds to finance the trip. The Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Niger all have less than 3 percent of people born there living in another country.
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