Children in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rates of child deaths in the world, a new Unicef report documents, yet much progress has been made globally to reduce child mortality since 1990. Here, a boy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. FRANCISCO MAGALLON
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx 1852
For the first time in the history of humanity, the technical means are at hand to eliminate poverty if resources were not diverted to making war. World hunger could be abolished with only a small diversion from military budgets.
These days, even if you don’t read online journals, or thick books not asssigned by universities, Google is enough to tell you how messy the Indian economic and social situation is. Earnings are low. Unemployment has reached new heights especially among the young and, with the adoption of automation and privatization, this will only worsen.
It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.
You can drive for ten or even twenty kilometers through it, and see only ugliness, fences and broken pavements. But there are many miserable cities on this planet, and I have worked in almost all of them, in 160 countries.
So why is ‘Jakarta killing me’? Why am I overwhelmed by depression whenever I decide to film here, or to write about the state in which its citizens are forced to live? Why, really, do I feel so desperate, so hopeless?
Washington, DC — The No Trump Military Parade coalition of 250 organizations is holding a Peace Congress in place of the Trump Military Parade, which they helped to stop. In a historic show of opposition to the glorification of war and waste of millions of public dollars, the coalition went beyond traditional peace group to include anti-poverty, housing, the environment and more.
I was at a city hall meeting in Beaverton, Oregon, the other day when a few questions I had for the presenters dropped jaws. We’ll get to that later, the jaw-dropping effect I and those of my ilk have when we end up in the controlled boardrooms and chambers of the controllers – bureaucrats, public-private clubs like Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, and both political operatives and those who liken themselves as the great planners of the world moving communities and housing and public commons around a giant chessboard to make things better for and more efficient in spite of us.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.
— Brazilian poet Martha Medieros
It was balmy and breezy by the bench where I sat outside a public library east of Atlanta, Georgia, brooding about the state of the world. It seemed like the end times, and I had just attended a fire and brimstone sermon, not perused the mainstream and alternative press. I had just spent a few hours on the internet, noting so many articles that announced that the world as we know it was coming to an end, or maybe just the world. The American Empire was collapsing, the U.S.A.
The general elections in Brazil on October 7 come amid recent upheavals which have resulted in a sharp political divide, with a large portion of the population either defending the idols they see as persecuted, or turning to the right in an attempt to escape the left they see as fully responsible for corruption and graft.
Meanwhile, a large percentage of the electorate are reeling in horror at the thought of voting for either of the two frontrunners.
