blessed britons

Unlike most European countries, and contrary to the recommendations of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, in Britain there is no legal limit to the time a person may be held in immigration detention. Periods of up to six months detention — for people who have not even been charged with a crime — are not uncommon. The IRCs are overcrowded and lack medical and recreational facilities. Communication with the outside world is severely restricted. Many detainees claim to have been insulted and assaulted by immigration staff. A recent study found that excessive force was used against a number of detainees who had already suffered torture in their countries of origin.

mad world

... for the poor to get slightly less poor, the rich have to get very much richer, implying patterns of consumption which, in a world facing climate change, cannot be sustained. It now takes around $166 worth of global growth - made up of all those energy-hungry giant flat screen TVs and sports utility vehicles - to generate a single dollar of poverty reduction for people in absolute poverty, compared with just $45 dollars in the 1980s.

— Andrew Simms

charity workers

$100 million is a lot of money

Submitted by antarchi on December 17, 2007 - 03:07.

If the point of 'international aid' is empowerment, in other words the transfer of some of the power (resources?) from those who have too much, to those who have none at all, then what a pathetic job most (international) ngo-businesses are doing. They build themselves up, every year winning more and more projects, more and more funding which they pile into 'reserves', core funding, new employees, more airfares, or increased salaries for managers directing the projects from a London base. For those same salaries, and for the cost of maintaining that London base they could have given employment, work experience, trust, and the possibility to direct their own affairs to goodness knows how many people for whom that funding was originally intended.