Sounds peculiar at first. You attend a charity banquet with a friend. Maybe you paid to get in. Maybe you didn’t. Your friend gets a full meal at a linen-clothed table while you sit on the floor and share a bowl of rice with strangers. Not fair? That’s the point. It’s called a hunger banquet. […]
Monthly Archives: November 2006
Annan Says Youth Is Key To Poverty Fight
With less than two months before he steps down as secretary-general after a 10-year tenure, Kofi Annan is disappointed that the international community is lagging behind in its much-touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. At this rate, he warns, many of the goals will […]
Manufacturing World Hunger
A recent article on ProgressiveU.org points out a main factor in world hunger, the destruction of food: If all food produced worldwide every year was counted, there would be enough to feed double the world’s current population. So why is it that 36 million people die of malnutrition every year? World hunger is a vast […]
Nelson Mandela: While Poverty Persists, There Is No Freedom
The below is a letter written by Nelson Mandela, of whom I am a great admirer. While poverty persists, there is no freedom BY NELSON MANDELA khaleejtimes.com 7 November 2006 [I have posted the poem he mentions, From the Republic of Conscience, below] IN JOHANNESBURG, this week, in the warm company of friends, like Nadine […]
African Oil Find Not Likely to Help Poor
The tiny island nation of Sao Tome is about to unlock the wealth from an estimated 11 billion barrels of oil from the seabed beneath those same Atlantic waters. The government says the oil is the answer to this country’s grinding poverty. Too often, in too many places across Africa, oil has only fomented despotism […]
Sens. Obama, Brownback To Get HIV tests
By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Associated Press Writer LOS ANGELES – Another sign of the new Washington: bipartisan HIV testing. At a world AIDS Day conference in California next month, two potential 2008 presidential rivals — Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. — will each take an HIV test and encourage others to do […]