Until the summer of 2008,
Orlande Noel supported his family of eight by operating a trucking business in Gonaives, Haiti,
a town of around two hundred thousand people.
Then four huge tropical
storms and hurricanes slammed into Haiti in 30 days. Massive mudslides and flooding roared down
the deforested mountains into Gonaives. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed and
people were trapped on rooftops for days.
Tearyan Brown became a father when he was
16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He
sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for
dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to
white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him
robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about
$1,400 a week.
"You don't have to do this." Those are the near-last words of several victims in the Coen brothers' classic film No Country for Old Men,
as they try to convince the movie's unrelenting assassin that he should
spare them. The assassin, played by Javier Bardem, finds this annoying,
because in his mind these murders are pre-determined.
Almost a year after Hurricane Hanna slammed into Haiti, the memory stops her cold.
Gracieuse Marius, a nurse, had huddled inside until the floodwaters subsided in the city of Gonaives, then she raced into the streets to find someone to save. Instead, she was confronted with silence: Cars, trees, and dead animals floated in the water. She still cannot bring herself to talk about the children.
NEW DELHI - One recent morning, as she'd done most days over the past 20 years, Fatima Begum left her hovel in a slum tucked in the corner of this city's diplomatic enclave and shuffled to a nearby dumpster to begin her work day.
As Begum began to root through refuse, searching for bottles, old light bulbs, and anything else that might be recyclable, someone punched the 65-year-old in the back of the head. She collapsed. Her attacker continued to punch and kick her.
"President Obama has promised to end child hunger in the United States by 2015. But you haven't heard about it. The media is writing about what Michelle Obama is wearing. Or what kind of dog they're going to get," Joel Berg almost shouted.
Fifty people showed up to hear Mr. Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, talk about his new book, "All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?" at WPXI last night.
RIO DE JANEIRO - While the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro insists that a wall being built around a poor neighbourhood is designed to protect what remains of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest from further encroachment by the slum, human rights groups say it is designed to further separate the rich and poor.
While the residents of the slums, known as favelas, built on the mountains surrounding the city are used to hiking up and down the steep stairs and alleyways of their neighbourhoods several times a day, climbing up to the wall is difficult for an outsider.
Get ready for the boomerang effect. The economic crisis that originated in this country has spread to the farthest corners of the planet. Global poverty is expected to jump by 53 million people and another 51 million workers will join the ranks of the jobless this year.
NEW YORK - From housebound grandmothers who relay on charity meal deliveries, to ailing retirees who cannot pay rising costs for medications, older Americans feeling the pinch of the financial crisis are getting angry and forming groups with names like "Senior Outrage."
In New York, with city and state tax revenues tumbling, benefits and services to the elderly are being cut, and many older residents are furiously drawing comparisons to the billions of dollars spent to bail out banks -- and pay Wall Street bonuses.
For many, Valentine's Day is a celebration of love. For others, Valentine's Day is about pain, heartache, and longing...but it doesn't have to be that way.
Valentine's Day and chocolate go hand-in-hand, but for parents of children trafficked into the cocoa fields and kept there as slaves, our hunger for chocolate is a nightmare of heartache for their stolen children.
