There was conversations about the middle-class squeeze, but nobody talked about the people in the Ninth Ward or the South Side of Chicago or Compton or Harlem.

NPR: Sen. Barack Obama on Poverty and Katrina

And I think, unfortunately, Katrina revealed that there's a gap between the ideal we have as a country and the reality that people are living every day in places like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

NPR: Sen. Barack Obama on Poverty and Katrina

America has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young people with a college degree.

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It gets only one-ninth the government funding as prostate cancer, which kills the same number people but has a big network of prominent survivors.

FORBES: Underfunded Diseases

Just by way of example, when you clump poor people together and when you clump poor, black people together, like we saw in New Orleans in the Ninth Ward, it's much harder for those families to lift themselves out of poverty.

NPR: Former V.P. Candidate Edwards: Class and Katrina

We still have people who haven't--you know, the Lower Ninth has still not been dealt with.

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At People's Ninth Hospital in Shanghai, a public hospital that is the city's busiest for cosmetic surgery, there were 50, 000 cosmetic operations in 2011, a 50% increase in five years, according to Qi Zuoliang, deputy director of the plastic-surgery department.

ECONOMIST: A growing obsession with the body beautiful

Sometimes people fanned out for breakout sessions around the vast Google floors that run the entire block from Eighth to Ninth Avenues, and which Google workers use scooters to navigate.

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