The hotly debated legislation stopped short of calling for a culling of the bear population through hunting.

'I can't walk, my speech is fucked up and I can't do anything for myself,' Fleischman, said. 'My wife helps me get into bed and I can't dress or put on my shoes. I am taking a gentle way out. It is the easiest way out for me.'

She said the new alternative is a respectful, cheaper and environmentally friendly way for humans to be returned back to Earth as soil.

A few years ago, the actor and singer revealed that he just wasn’t ready for fatherhood, acknowledging that becoming a dad is a big responsibility that he wouldn’t be able to fully commit to at the moment. He admitted, “I think it’s really important to be present if you have children. I have a lot of...things to take care of.”

Chicago is the six-time holder of a title that no city wants.

For the sixth year in a row, Chicago is the country's "rattiest city."

The Windy City has topped the list of the rattiest cities in the United States for the sixth year in a row.

Orkin, an Atlanta-based pest control service, ranks US cities based on the number of new rodent treatments from September 1 to August 31 of each year. The result is a list of 50 cities, with most changing spots each time the list is updated. Chicago, however, is still No. 1.

"Rodents are experts at sniffing out food and shelter, and they're resilient in their ways to obtain both," Ben Hottel, an Orkin entomologist, said in the company's press release. "Residential properties offer the ideal habitat for rodents, and once they've settled in, they're capable of reproducing rapidly and in large quantities."

Efforts to tame the city's rat population have been going on for years. Chicago's "war on rats" escalated with the introduction of a new rat task force back in 2016. Residents had even begun adopting cats to squash their numbers.

A new report estimates that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said Friday that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia.

"The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history," she told a U.N. news conference.

Walk Free defines modern slavery "as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain," she said.

According to the report, titled "Stacked Odds," women account for 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation, 84% of all victims of forced marriage, and 58% of all victims of forced labour.

I was 31 the last time I got pregnant. And after a lifetime of certainty that I did not want to be a mother, I felt an unexpected thing, cutting through the panic and the nausea: happiness.

Every morning since an intuitive nudge sent me to fetch a pregnancy test from the drugstore, my breasts oddly sore and my stomach in a low-level but constant state of turbulence, I would wake up with the thought: “I can do this. I want to do this.”

By the time I fell asleep at night, I was sure there was no possible way I could do this, this being raising a child on my own.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about declining birth rates, the lowest in more than 30 years, across all race and class divides. We’re told millennial women “choosing” not to have children will be bad for the economy, it will be bad for the ageing baby boomer population, it will be bad for the real estate market. According to Forbes, it’s bad for older women desperate for grandchildren. But are people actually deciding to delay families, or are they finding themselves in unstable situations where the addition of a child seems unworkable? The reasons given when op-ed writers bother to ask millennials – too much debt, not enough financial security, a romantic market that is as rocky as the job market – point more to the latter.

If everyone makes it into the world safely, things that used to be taken for granted are now scarce resources one might fight and compete for. Vitally important systems like decent childcare, education and healthcare has disappeared, leaving parents to choose between inadequate choices or sacrificing untold amounts of money, time and energy to compete the limited amount of something better.