Record gains for U.S. poverty with elections looming
Ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels, demographers claim
By HOPE YEN, LIZ SIDOTI
WASHINGTON – The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.
Census figures for 2009 – the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency – are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.
Earth, wind and fire: How tapping into the natural world is going mainstream
Ten people, ten different ways to change your lifestyle, to save money and the planet. They talk to Gervase Poulden and Matt Chorley about what they’ve given up and what they’ve gained in their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint
Sunday, 12 September 2010
WaterIn short supply in many parts of the world, water will be come even more scarce as demand grows. Average consumption in the UK, at 146 litres per person a day, is only slightly less than the 152 litres used daily 15 years ago.
The heatwaves and water restrictions of recent years have, however, encouraged some, such as 34-year-old Neil McNiven, an electronics engineer from Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire, to do more to save water.
USA
On 9/11, commemorations accompanied by focus on Islam
By Ann Gerhart and David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 12, 2010; 12:28 AM
Moments of silence and reminders of American freedoms have become the healing rites of Sept. 11. On Saturday, heated arguments about the legacy and lessons of the terror attacks nine years ago finally seeped into the day itself.
Heightened anxieties over a fringe pastor’s plan to burn copies of the Koran and demonstrations centering on a planned mosque near New York’s Ground Zero set a newly divisive tone – one that suggested deepening discord over the role of Islam in America.
Obama’s electoral coalition is crumbling
The swing voters who turned out in droves to support the president aren’t likely to back his party in November. Even core supporters express unhappiness with Democrats.
By James Oliphant and Kathleen Hennessey
Reporting from Washington – Nearly two years ago, the political world could only marvel at the breadth of voter support for Barack Obama.The new president had won over voters once thought to have abandoned his party for good. He’d found new reservoirs of support among groups many thought were tapped out.
He energized a coalition – made up of blacks, women, Latinos, young voters and large numbers of suburbanites – that some believed would keep Democrats in power for years to come.
Europe
Merkel ally quits after claiming Nazis didn’t start war
By Tony Paterson in Berlin Saturday, 11 September 2010
In Poland, she remains Germany’s most hated living politician. Her unashamedly revanchist political views once prompted a Warsaw news magazine to portray her on its front cover clad in a sinister, swastika-covered Nazi SS uniform.But yesterday, Erika Steinbach, probably the last surviving bête noire in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative government, took the first step towards bowing out of politics altogether after she started an explosive row over who was to blame for starting the Second World War.
An ill wind blows for Denmark’s green energy revolution
Denmark has long been a role model for green activists, but now it has become one of the first countries to turn against the turbines.
By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 8:00AM BST 12 Sep 2010
To green campaigners, it is windfarm heaven, generating a claimed fifth of its power from wind and praised by British ministers as the model to follow. But amid a growing public backlash, Denmark, the world’s most windfarm-intensive country, is turning against the turbines.
Last month, unnoticed in the UK, Denmark’s giant state-owned power company, Dong Energy, announced that it would abandon future onshore wind farms in the country. “Every time we were building onshore, the public reacts in a negative way and we had a lot of criticism from neighbours,” said a spokesman for the company. “Now we are putting all our efforts into offshore windfarms.”
Middle East
Iran: women on the frontline of the fight for rights
From the mother sentenced to death by stoning to the lawyer arrested for defending opposition activists, women are prominent symbols of Iran’s struggle for democracy
Peter Beaumont
The Observer, Sunday 12 September 2010
When Shahrzad Kariman finally saw her imprisoned daughter Shiva Nazar Ahari earlier this month, it was for a brief moment outside the Tehran courtroom where the 26-year-old human rights campaigner had been brought. “We could see her for a few minutes,” Kariman told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran last week. “Just enough to hug her. But we couldn’t ask her how the court session went… We didn’t know what the charges were prior to the court session.”The charges against Nazar Ahari are among the most serious that can be levelled in Iran: muharebeh (enmity against God), a crime, in theory punishable by death, originally intended to be used against armed gangs and pirates, not dissidents.
Turkey votes on reforms to constitution
The people of Turkey have begun voting in a referendum on changing the constitution, which was drafted under military rule in the early 1980s.
The BBC 12 September 2010
The government says it wants to bring the constitution more in line with European Union standards.Opponents argue that the governing party, which has its roots in political Islam, is seeking dangerous levels of control over the judiciary.
The referendum is expected to produce a close result.
There are 26 amendments to the constitution on the table.
They are mostly small and somewhat technocratic alterations, which many find difficult to understand, says the BBC’s Jonathan Head in Istanbul.
Asia
China rethinks its controversial one-child policy
The country’s social engineering has been too successful, reports Clifford Coonan in Beijing
Sunday, 12 September 2010
China’s one-child policy, probably the most audacious exercise in social engineering the world has ever seen, could be up for review, as Beijing policymakers worry about the effects of a population ageing fast, with insufficient numbers of youngsters to support them.There is speculation that a gradual rollback of the policy – first imposed 31 years ago – will start next year with pilot schemes in the five provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
Middlesbrough Ladies’ North Korean football tour guarantees place in history
Women’s team from Teesside will become first from Britain to play on North Korean soil
Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 12 September 2010
North Korea, the most secretive country on earth, the nation George Bush located on the Axis of Evil, where the flame of Marxism-Leninism still burns strong, will this week welcome its first British football team: 14 Teesside women players aged from 17 to 23, and their manager, Marrie Wieczorek.On Thursday, Middlesbrough FC Ladies set off on a football tour with less bar-hopping (it’s illegal to leave your hotel without your guide) and probably more talk about dialectical materialism than usual. “I think it is going to be a bit of a culture shock,” says Wieczorek. “The whole place is shrouded in secrecy.”
Africa
Congo examines mass graves to find proof of revenge genocide on Hutus
As a UN report suggests Rwandan complicity in slaughter of refugees, forensic scientists hope to find the evidence
Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita in Goma Tracy McVeigh in London
The Observer, Sunday 12 September 2010
Forensic science experts examining mass graves in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could provide further evidence of a Tutsi-led retaliatory genocide of Hutu civilians in the mid-1990s.A diplomatic row is raging over a draft of a UN report, leaked to the press late last month, that accuses Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s troops of massacring Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring Zaire, now Congo, after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that left 800,000 dead. The intervention of Kagame’s forces has been credited with ending the 1994 killings.
Latin America
Eight months after Haiti earthquake, a nation hangs on
Those displaced by the Haiti earthquake continue to live in overcrowded camps, well into a hurricane season that regularly brings heavy rains.
By Alice Speri, Correspondent
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Almost eight months after a devastating earthquake killed up to 300,000 and left some 1.5 million Haitians homeless, recovery has been slow. Equipment to remove some of the 20 million cubic meters of rubble that for months have lined the capital’s streets has finally arrived. The displaced continue to live in overcrowded camps, well into a hurricane season that has caused no major damage but regularly brings heavy rains.”There is a real threat that temporary camps will turn into permanent slums,” says Julie Schindall, a spokesperson for Oxfam, one of 800 NGOs operating here. “The government has a responsibility to implement a resettlement plan and they have to do it now.”