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“Goodness will always, and in every circumstance, portray a vivid and credible image of a God who continues to break barriers of discrimination, isolation and indifference.”
Efforts to end urban poverty are failing because policymakers in aid agencies and in governments do not always understand it, asserts a new book by experts from the International Institute for Environment and Development.
Families of missing activists have urged the government to immediately implement a new law that criminalizes enforced disappearances. Bayan Intise, son of a couple believed to have been abducted by state agents, said the challenge for the government is to prove that it can end abductions of people by agents of the state.
A statement signed by over 60 environmental, development and farming groups calls for pension funds and other financial institutions to stop land grabbing. “Africa, Asia and Latin America are seeing an acceleration of land grabbing at a rate not seen since colonial times,” says Nyikaw Ochalla of the Anuak people from Ethiopia, whose livelihoods are threatened by land grabs of foreign companies. “Land is the lifeline of hunter–gatherers, pastoralists, fishing and farming communities in the Ethiopian lands targeted by a land grabbing policy. It is a myth that our lands are ‘wastelands,’ only suitable for commercial agricultural development.” Land grabbing by pension funds and other financial institutions must be stopped.
A new report on global religious identity shows that, while Christians and Muslims make up the two largest groups, those with no religious affiliation – including atheists and agnostics – are now the third–largest religious group in the world. The study, released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that more than 8 in 10 (84%) of the world’s 7 billion people adhere to some form of religion. Christians make up the largest group, with 2.2 billion adherents, or 32%, worldwide, followed by the Muslims, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23%, worldwide.
On November 28, 2012, the third day of the United Framework Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar, a report released by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), stated that ice melt in the Arctic Ocean reached a record new low with a loss, from March to September, of a staggering 11.83 million square miles, an area larger than the United States. In the words of Michel Jarruad, secretary–general of the WMO, “the alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far–reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere. Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records.”
The government should be reminded that the worsening problem of informal settlers in the urban areas is a mere consequence of its failure to address the root problems in the countryside. It should not only relocate informal settlers to better communities
and give them affordable housing units. It also has to attend to the concerns of the rural poor households, that will most likely constitute the next batches of informal settlers in the cities if scarcity of jobs, prevalence of armed conflict, and remoteness to educational and health facilities continue to prevail in their hometowns. If it really wants to curb the trending migration of poor families from the rural to the urban areas, government should sincerely implement the long overdue comprehensive agrarian reform program.
