SEOUL — A South Korean government-funded human rights group has released a series of raw firsthand accounts of North Korea’s political prison camps, Seoul’s first comprehensive attempt to catalogue the atrocities that Pyongyang denies take place.
Author: WHES
House bill offers $261 billion in cuts to programs helping struggling Americans in order to save military spending
WASHINGTON — The Republican-led House this week will lay bare the choice between social programs and Pentagon spending in an age of austerity when it takes up legislation to slice $261 billion from food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programs for struggling Americans over the next decade to stave off more than $50 billion in military spending cuts scheduled to take effect next year.
Ethiopia: Too many deaths in childbirth
In Ethiopia, a lack of awareness of the importance of skilled hospital deliveries, cultural beliefs and transport challenges in rural areas are causing a high number of deaths during childbirth, say officials. Only 10% of deliveries take place within health facilities, according to the Ethiopia’s latest demographic health survey results. Nevertheless, the figure is a significant improvement on 6% in the previous survey, in 2005.
The health minister, Kesetebirhan Admasu, said: “About 60% of mothers who did not attend health facilities while giving birth do not see the benefit of delivering in health facilities, while the remaining 30% abstain from going there by giving culture and beliefs as their reason. That [the] majority of women did not appreciate the value of institutional delivery calls for a concerted effort to educate women and families about the importance of skilled birth attendance and postnatal care.”
Reasons abound for lack of job growth (jobs added in April 115,000; workers dropping out of job market 342,000; still unemployed 13,700,000)
The nation’s employers are creating jobs at less than half the pace they were when this year began, according to a government report released Friday.
4 years later, race is still an issue for some voters
STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — This is the land of die-hard Democrats — mill workers, coal miners and union members. They have voted party line for generations, forming a reliable constituency for just about any Democrat who decides to run for office.But when it comes to President Obama, a small part of this constituency balks.
America’s long-term unemployed: ‘For those looking for work, it’s very bleak’
Before the birth of her fourth child, Keron Bartholomew decided she needed to be near her family in Orlando, Florida. Her partner, Fernando Bogle, was still in college in New York, and was hoping to become a pharmacist. He planned to join them when he graduated. But within a year of her move in 2009, Keron had lost her job. Bogle left school to find a job, but couldn’t, and by the end of the year the family was homeless. “It’s been a rat race ever since,” said Bogle.
Fallout of Bin Laden raid: Aid groups in Pakistan are suspect
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — In the shadows of the American operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the fate of a small-town Pakistani doctor recruited by the C.I.A. to help track the Qaeda leader still looms between the two countries, a sore spot neither can leave untouched.
CEO pay and the top 1%–How executive compensation and financial-sector pay have fueled income inequality
Growing income inequality has a number of sources, but a distinct aspect of rising inequality in the United States is the wage gap between the very highest earners—those in the upper 1.0 percent or even upper 0.1 percent—and other earners, including other high-wage earners. Driving this ever-widening gap is the unequal growth in earnings enjoyed by those at the top. The average annual earnings of the top 1 percent of wage earners grew 156 percent from 1979 to 2007; for the top 0.1 percent they grew 362 percent (Mishel, Bivens, Gould, and Shierholz 2012). In contrast, earners in the 90th to 95th percentiles had wage growth of 34 percent, less than a tenth as much as those in the top 0.1 percent tier. Workers in the bottom 90 percent had the weakest wage growth, at 17 percent from 1979 to 2007.
Defense trumps poverty in Republican House
American soldiers learned the hard way not to walk down enemy trails in Vietnam — and certainly not twice. But here come the House Republicans, marching into the sunlight by shifting billions from poverty programs to the Pentagon, all within hours of adopting an entirely new round of tax cuts for those earning more than $1 million a year.
US lags in global measure of premature births
Fifteen million babies are born prematurely each year, and the United States fared badly in the first country-by-country global comparison of premature births, which was released Wednesday by the World Health Organization and other agencies.
