hunger

Bearing quilted bedcovers Afghans walk through the cemetery to their mountainside homes

I don’t know if you came across a piece of news from Kolhapur, Maharashtra, published a few days back in several national dailies. No wonder you might have missed it, it was (purposely) snug in one tight corner of most papers like a hibernating animal, meant to be left untouched. Well, the news was that a twenty-seven-year-old, hungry man, Sunil[Read More...]

If you mindlessly watch TV, you could easily wind up wasting the entire day. If you mindlessly drive, you could wind up getting lost, or worse. Likewise, mindlessly eating will cause you to gain weight, especially if the food is void of nutrition. The exact opposite is also true, a study found – giving your full attention to the food in front of you can lead to weight loss. [1]

You Consume Fear: Then You are What you Eat!
Endless ignorance, presaged by fear, hate, suspicion, paranoia, misanthropy, and then all galvanized to the constructions of neutering culture of consumerism.

Every Palestinian I met on my visits to the Holy Land urged me to tell their story when I got home. Some have written to me with very moving accounts of misery and excruciating hardship under Israel’s brutal occupation, reinforcing the appalling truths I’d seen for myself.
Two years ago a young woman, a war-weary mom of three in a Gaza refugee camp, wrote to tell me that schools in Gaza were working in 2 or 3 shifts a day “especially in areas where displaced people of the last war still shelter in UNRWA schools — they don’t have any other place to go.”

A South Sudanese refugee sits on a mat outside a communal tent with his brother at the Imvepi reception center, where newly arrived refugees are processed in northern Uganda Friday, June 9, 2017. (AP/Ben Curtis)
“[Famine] seems to be the last, most dreadful resource of nature…the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to provide subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
– Thomas Malthus, “Essay on Population”

In cities and towns from New Delhi to New York the socio-political policies that led to the Grenfell Tower disaster in west London are being repeated: redevelopment and gentrification, the influx of corporate money and the expelling of the poor, including families that have lived in an area for generations. To this, add austerity, the privatization of public services and the annihilation of social housing and a cocktail of interconnected causes takes shape.

Mohammed Abed is a 28-year-old taxi driver from the village of Qarara, near the town of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. He has no teeth.
Lack of medical care and proper dentistry work cost him all of his teeth, which rotted and decayed at a very young age. Yet, his dire financial needs prevented him from acquiring dentures. His community eventually pitched in, collecting the few hundred dollars needed for Mohammed to finally being able to eat.

It is a bright sunny day in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. The sky is clear blue and the air is cool. It’s definitely a windows-down driving day as I get in my ’99 Camaro and set off to work from Arlington, Virginia to 16th and K Street in downtown Washington. It is just about six miles to get from home, near the Pentagon and Fort Myer, to the office.

President Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia is designed to highlight his “art of deal” by clinching a massive $100 billion arms deal. But instead of using his presidency to be a salesman for the arms industry, Trump should be a statesmen for the suffering Yemenis. He should use his visit to press for a ceasefire and negotiations to end the conflict in Yemen.