The Department of Veterans Affairs is failing to keep up with a torrent of benefits claims, and the backlog leaves many service members high and dry for well over a year after first filing their forms, a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting finds.

From the CIR report:

The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the internal data indicates that veterans filing their first claim, …

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There are train wrecks, and there are train wrecks. Then there’s San Onofre.

You probably know San Onofre as the full-figured fiasco overlooking the Pacific Ocean near the Orange/San Diego county line. Beginning in 2004, Southern California Edison, the nuclear power plant’s principal owner, oversaw a $770-million project to replace its two aging steam generators with new models. The new units, which were supposed to last 20 years, lasted scarcely 20 months before showing alarmingly severe …

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As Mayor Nutter prepares to unveil a new budget to City Council, the city’s top union leaders on Wednesday excoriated Nutter’s handling of municipal labor issues and called on Council members to take their side.

“He’s trying to take away our right to collective bargaining,” said Patrick Eiding, president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO, at a lunchtime rally that drew about 300 union supporters to the north side of City Hall.

Eiding said the union movement would be …

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The migratory population of the monarch butterfly has reached an “ominous” low, researchers in Mexico announced Wednesday.

Scientists are attributing the decline of this essential pollinating population to the ongoing drought and the “explosive” increase in the use of genetically modified crops in the American corn belt.

“Because farmers have planted over 120 million acres of crops resistant to the milkweed-killing herbicide glyphosate, the monarchs’ essential food supply has been all but destroyed.”

Released by the Mexican government …

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China uses 20 million trees each year to feed the country’s disposable chopstick habit, Bo Guangxin, the head of a major forestry group, told Chinese parliamentarians on Friday according to Chinese state media. At 4,000 chopsticks per tree, that’s roughly 80 billion chopsticks per year — far more than the 57 billion estimated by the country’s national forest bureau.

While this is hardly the first time that the chopstick issue has come up in China, the …

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The USDA is considering buying 400,000 tons of sugar in an aim to limit supply and boost prices so that sugar producers can pay back government loans that they’re in danger of defaulting on, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move would be an exercise of an untested provision inserted in the 2008 farm bill called the Feedstock Flexibility Program, which allows the USDA to intervene in the market to raise prices.

While the artificial price …

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In an era when buyers of all backgrounds have found buying or refinancing a home difficult, women have had a particularly tough time, a new study by a Chicago nonprofit found.

Chicago women who applied for a new home mortgage in 2010 were 24 percent less likely to obtain a loan than men, the study by the Woodstock Institute found. Lenders were 39 percent less likely to refinance a woman’s existing mortgage, the study says.

The study …

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In February 2008, I attended an New York University faculty meeting about the school’s plans to open a new campus in the tiny desert emirate of Abu Dhabi. I was there reporting for a New York magazine article about the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. Hoping to be a fly on the wall, I instead found myself seated at the head of the table, bombarded with …

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The Los Angeles chapter of No More Jails Coalition is taking it to the streets today, telling L.A. County supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Gloria Molina, Don Knabe, and Mike Antonovich that the plan for embattled Sheriff Lee Baca to build a new women’s jail is a crazy way to spend millions of tax dollars.

“We don’t need these new jail cells, we don’t want these new jail cells, we can’t afford these new jail cells,” …

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Every member of Congress has chosen whether to sign a letter making a crucial commitment: “We will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security benefits — including raising the retirement age or cutting the cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.”

The Democratic Party hierarchy doesn’t like the letter. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has said that cutting Social Security would “strengthen” it, and President Obama’s spokespeople keep …

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