Word: numbering
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...sound bite," says Joyce Raezer of the National Military Family Association, which fights to improve the lot of military families. "There are a lot more pressing issues." Housing, for example: there are 500,000 old and decrepit military housing units needing repair. McCain's plan to reduce the number of troops on food stamps would cost about $6 million annually. Giving military families and individual troops a decent place to live would cost $1 billion annually. Election year or not, that's no cheap applause line...
What pushes that small number of troops onto food stamps is a combination of little money and big families. Consider military pay. Certainly no one enlists for the dough. A raw recruit earns $930 a month, and even a sergeant with 10 years in uniform is paid less than $22,000 a year. Nearly half the members of the Army and Marine Corps, along with 26% of Navy and 18% of Air Force personnel, make less than $20,000. And this is where family size becomes key. Close to 60% of military families eligible for food stamps have six members...
Attempts to tackle the food-stamp issue have backfired. Last month Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon's new personnel chief, ignited a firestorm when he proposed cutting in half the number of soldiers on food stamps by counting their on-base housing as income. The proposal, not surprisingly, turned out to be a p.r. disaster. The Pentagon would have been cutting its food-stamp rolls not by boosting benefits but by a bookkeeping trick. Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered the scheme scrapped. Instead, Cohen is taking the opposite tack. He wants to stop counting the off-base housing allowance no longer...
Should food aid to a needy country be tied to how its government behaves? For these two forlorn children in the drought-ravaged wasteland of Ethiopia's southeast, the answer may well determine if they live or die. The pair number among millions of largely nomadic people in the vast Horn of Africa region, threatened once again by famine. Three straight years of scant rainfall have caused the blistering of large tracts of grazing land, killing off herds of livestock and resulting in the death of hundreds of people, a figure that could rise alarmingly in coming months. Several countries...
...cold war ended a decade ago, but Russia and the U.S. still have double the number of nuclear weapons that even their militaries say they now need. Last month Putin got his parliament to ratify the 1993 START II treaty, which would bring down each side's warhead count to between 3,000 and 3,500. But Moscow will not begin cutting under START II until the Senate ratifies side agreements Clinton negotiated in 1997 that strengthen the ABM treaty...