hunger

For 32 years I have called Venezuela home. Its mountains have given me beauty, its barrios have given me music, its struggles have given me purpose, and its people have given me love.
Its Bolivarian Revolution gave me hope. How could I not feel hope when most of my neighbors, ages 2 to 70, were studying, right in our little potato-growing town in the mountains of western Venezuela. How could I not be hopeful when 18 neighbor families received new homes to replace their unhealthy, crowded living spaces?

Dear Friends,
Greetings from the state of Aragua in Venezuela where we are concluding a small US delegation focused on grassroots solutions to the massive food crisis here.
I am reaching out to you to share my grave concerns about what is happening here in Venezuela, my home for over three decades where I worked for 21 years as a Maryknoll Catholic lay missioner, then as Latin America Coordinator for the School of the Americas Watch.

Portland pesticides, medical errors and unhealthy headlines + this day in history w/Haymarket affair and our song of the day by Japancakes on your Morning Monarchy for May 4, 2016.

Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are once again at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish.

May of 2012, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s poor generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk.

Basic Income is a serious proposal necessary to address many of the economic problems facing the developed world. Let us start by defining what Basic Income is. For that, the Green Party’s paper on the subject is helpful:

Every year since 2009, the United Nations has highlighted February 20th as the World Day for Social Justice in a bid to underscore the glaring inequalities that increasingly characterise the world today – from growing levels of poverty and rising unemployment rates, to various forms of discrimination on the basis of class, race and gender.

Imagine you wake one fine morning and find you are living in a war zone, aerial bombardments are a weekly occurrence, family members have been killed, tortured or imprisoned and the children’s school destroyed. You love your country, but frightened and desperate you decide to leave in search of a new home, in a peaceful place, where you can study, work and have a chance to live out your days happily.

Research by Dr.

Has the international community left it too late to prevent runaway climate change and widespread ecological degradation? Does the typical citizen and career politician have the inclination to accept the severity of the ‘planetary emergency’, let alone make the lifestyle changes and policy decisions needed to address it? And can the upcoming UN climate negotiations in Paris really signal an end to the unregulated dumping of carbon emissions, or mark a shift away from the business-as-usual approach to economic development?