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Catholics, others urge increased funding for children’s health care

WASHINGTON – Catholic organizations have joined with a variety of medical, civic, labor and other religious groups in calling on Congress to increase funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, despite a threatened veto by President George W. Bush. Representatives of nearly three dozen organizations participated in a July 25 Capitol Hill news conference organized by the Catholic Health Association, which also released a new public opinion poll that showed Americans overwhelmingly support the program known as SCHIP.

Church shelter helps Central Americans en route to U.S.

TIERRA BLANCA, Mexico – On a recent evening at the Guadalupe Migrant Shelter, the atmosphere was festive: Volunteers joked, played guitars and loaded enormous steaming pots of beans and rice into the back of a pickup truck. Then they were off, heading to the dusty railroad tracks that pass through the center of this sweltering city in southern Mexico. Word had it that a train would arrive around midnight with hundreds of unauthorized passengers, Central American migrants who jumped on the rail cars near Mexico’s southern border and hitched a ride north toward the United States and its plentiful jobs.

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