infant mortality

Poverty: American Style

In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the U.S.’s poorest neighborhoods.   Alston, the author of the quoted phrase in the excerpt, is an Australian who is a professor of law at New York University.  During his mission, he visited Alabama, California, West Virginia, Texas, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico.

The Tragedy of being a Girl in India

It is said that India is the ‘most dangerous country in the world in which to be a girl’, a controversial United Nations finding based on a range of distressing social statistics rooted in gender and caste prejudice, much of which can be traced back to 18th century colonialism and the destructive ‘divide and rule’ methodology employed by the British.