I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
This is hardly surprising given the sky high unemployment rate in the state, but the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest statistics for 2009 and the poverty rate in Michigan jumped a full percent, from 13 percent to 14 percent. At the same time, median household income in the state continued its steep decline and [...]
Sometime this week, the Census Bureau will release figures on poverty in the United States in 2009. The Associated Press asked some demographers to sketch out the probable results — and they are grim.
More than 835,000 Michigan families who qualify for social services such as Medicaid or the free lunch program will be eligible for a free cell phone with 200 free minutes per month as part of a Federal Communications Commission program to ensure that low-income citizens have access to communications devices, the Grand Rapids Press reports.
The rough Michigan economy is thought to have driven down the divorce rate in recent years, but those who are divorcing are trying to hold down costs by representing themselves. Increasingly these couples are splitting up debt rather than assets. The Detroit News reports that Southeast Michigan legal aid clinics and court rooms are clogged [...]
The annual Kids Count report was officially released today and with it a bleak paper trail charting higher poverty rates across Michigan, as well as related social ills like rising rates of child abuse and neglect. It’s not a pretty picture. But none of it should be too surprising given the state of the local [...]
A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that nearly a quarter of Michigan children under five years of age now live in poverty, the Petoskey News-Review reports. As the state moves to cut assistance programs in the 2010 budget, Bill Denemy, director of the Department of Human Services for Emmet and Charlevoix counties, [...]
The Michigan Department of Agriculture’s food bank program will be cut by 14 percent under a budget approved by a panel of House and Senate negotiators yesterday, AP reports. The Michigan Agriculture Surplus Program pays farmers to harvest, clean, package and ship surplus fruits and vegetables that they donate to Michigan’s needy. It supplied around [...]
More kids are being removed from their homes because their parents are poor, Curt Guyette of the Detroit Metro Times, reports. Guyette profiles Melanie Morgan of Lansing whose battle for custody of her sons reached the state Supreme Court. The small size of the home where Morgan lived with her three kids and extended family [...]
The median price of a house sold in the city of Detroit has fallen to a staggering $7,500, the Chicago Tribune reports. And the bad news simply piles on top of that frightening statistic:
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