To 13-year-old Mumo Katumo, the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC) is an utter irrelevance. For the past year Mumo and her family
have been struggling to stay alive in the drought-ridden Masinga
district of eastern Kenya with little food or water and with no hope of
going to school.
Mumo describes the pain of her hunger: "You go
numb. You lose the ability to do anything. Sometimes I think it is like
the feeling of dying."
The
UN children's agency says one billion children around the world are
still deprived of food, shelter, clean water and healthcare 20 years
after the adoption of a treaty guaranteeing children's rights.
Hundreds of millions more children are constantly threatened by
violence, Unicef said in a report released on Thursday assessing the
situation two decades after the UN adopted the Convention of the Rights
of the Child on November 20 1989.
At the age of 13, Ishmael and his friends began sniffing
"brown-brown"--a mix of cocaine and gunpowder--and wielding AK-47s. By
the age of 16, Ishmael had killed "too many people to count" by his own
admission. "All I knew was how to fight and loot," recalled Ishmael.
If Ishmael had committed such atrocities in the United States, he
would be sitting in a dank prison serving a life sentence without any
possibility of parole.
The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat.
Speaking to a crowd of 900 survivors of state care who had gathered in
Canberra,
Mr
Rudd apologised for his country's role in the migrations, which
continued until the 1960s.
He also apologised to the 500,000 "Forgotten Australians" who were
taken from their families and placed in care homes around the country.
LONDON - Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because they don't get enough to eat, according to a new report published Wednesday by UNICEF.
The vast majority are in Asia and Africa: more than 90 percent of children with stunted growth live on those two continents.
"Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow," said UNICEF executive director Ann M. Veneman in a statement.
On Monday, the Supreme
Court heard oral argument in a pair of cases from Florida, Graham
v. Florida and Sullivan v.
In the lunchroom at Stowe Elementary School in Duluth, Minn., forlorn piles of half-eaten sandwiches and bruised bananas are transformed from trash to treasure.
Instead of tossing their uneaten school lunch scraps in the garbage bin, Stowe students donate their leftover fruits and vegetables to the school's worm compost. Items that aren't as compost-friendly, such as breads and potatoes, are donated to area farmers, who feed the free and tasty slop to their pigs.
WASHINGTON - Federal agencies that supply food for 31 million schoolchildren fail to ensure that tainted products are pulled quickly from cafeterias, a federal audit obtained by USA TODAY finds.
The delays raise the risk of children being sickened by contaminated food, according to the audit by Congress' Government Accountability Office.
PHILADELPHIA - Located across from an indoor skateboarding park in a Northeast Philadelphia outlet mall, the Army Experience Center includes a computer lab that showcases careers as well as the kind of interactive simulators that are irresistible to its target market: the teenage boys recruiters hope will fuel the Army of the future.
