MatrixLeaks

If you’re a typical family, you’re considerably poorer than you used to be. No wonder the “recovery” feels like a recession. A  new study published by the Russell Sage foundation helps explain why many families feel like they’re falling behind: They actually are. The study, which measures the average wealth of U.S. households by income level, reveals a startling decline in wealth nationwide. The median household in 2013 had a net worth of just $56,335 -- 43% lower than the median wealth level right before the recession began in 2007, and 36% lower than a decade ago. “There are very few signs of significant recovery from the losses in wealth suffered by American families during the Great Recession,” the study concludes. Wealth generally comes from two types of assets: financial holdings and real estate. Financial assets have more than recovered ground lost during the recession, thanks largely to a stock-market rally now in its sixth year. The S&P 500 index, for in...

Bodies Of 800 Children, Found at Former Irish Home For Unwed Mothers In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there's a two-metre stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of "fallen women" and their "illegitimate" children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate. More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed - where a housing development and children's playground now stands - what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins. Children at "the Hom...