Millions drive past the favela of Vila Esperança, with its rampant unemployment and open sewers. But thanks to a three-meter high concrete wall, they don’t see it.
Tag: poverty
Climate change is already affecting people’s lives, even as some may try to deny it. If nothing is done to curtail it, the impact will be much more pronounced in the coming years and decades, not only for certain communities — in low-lying coastal areas, for example — but for entire regions. Fast forward to […]
High ticket prices and fancy stadiums are making the games of the national pastime off-limits for most of Brazil’s population.
Public development assistance has not achieved its objective of reducing entrenched poverty in Africa. Its scarcity requires the use of new forms of co-financing and investment.
GENEVA — It may sound like hocus-pocus, but with the growing influx of African migrants, social services in Switzerland are having to tackle a new and perplexing problem: witchcraft. The phenomenon specifically involves African women — mostly prostitutes from Nigeria — who were “bewitched” before leaving home and suffer serious psychological consequences as a result. […]
A pulsing, hazy world comes to life every night in Brazil’s largest city, as drug traffickers and users gather to buy, sell, barter, smoke. When police intervene, a new neighborhood is found.
Ahead of the high stakes of next week’s French presidential election, a visit to ‘la France profonde,’ deep in the heartland where the country’s fate may be decided.
SAO PAULO — “My name is Daniel Garcia and I’m 18. I love reading Folha de S. Paulo! Today, I read an article about women unsung heroes, and I believe that my own mother fits that category perfectly. Marlene Garcia is 59, she’s black and she used to be a cleaning lady. Every day, without […]
In India’s patriarchal society, there’s a cultural tendency to favor boys, which leads to too many parents each year abandoning their baby girls. At least there is a way to avoid the worst outcome.
SAO PAULO — Anywhere you look, they’re there. You could be attacked, even inside your own home. For the 800 indigenous Guarani people living in the four villages of the northern Sao Paulo district of Jaragua, the threat of getting hurt by stray dogs is growing. Locals estimate that there are as many dogs as […]
LES CAYES — As you move through the Haitian cities that stood on Hurricane Matthew’s destructive path, a disturbing question strikes you: What was destroyed in the recent storm and what was damaged from before? You can see scrap metal and zinc sheets that were used as roofs. You can glimpse children bathing in and […]
A new Brazilian report shows that far more babies born with microcephaly and other conditions linked to the Zika virus are black or mixed race. There are troubling explanations for this fact, including access to (illegal) abortion.
TEHRAN — A councilwoman in Tehran, Fatemeh Daneshvar, said that a growing number of male beggars are dressing like females in the Iranian capital, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported last week. “Some of these beggars are Pakistani and some are dressed as girls, and of course the feminine beggars have increased,” Daneshvar said, […]
-Analysis- SAO PAULO — Brazil’s leftist Workers’ Party always liked to think of itself as a crusader for the poor. Yet in the wake of the party’s 13 years in power, there are still 73,327,179 citizens living below the poverty line in the country — a staggering 36% of the population. Don’t take it from […]
This African country produces more refugees per capita than any other. But there is method to the madness: Gambia’s dictator systematically banishes people and refuses to accept repatriation agreements. And he receives European funds for his services.
OCUMARE — It’s midday on this Thursday, and hundreds of people are squeezing inside a supermarket in Ocumare, a poor city about an hour’s drive south of Caracas. Armed police officers are allowing people in, but just a few at a time, infuriating the multitude massed outside since dawn to buy corn flour at a […]
TUCUMÁN — Pope Francis declared war on waste months ago. Now, three of his kinsmen in northern Argentina have developed an idea to keep perfectly good food from being tossed and to help the hungry at the same time: “social fridges” where people can leave “neat portions” of leftover food. The initiative was launched in […]
BEIJING — A few days ago, somebody posted a video taken somewhere on a street in China. It could be almost anywhere. The video showed a little boy defending his grandma, a street vendor, and brandishing a steel pipe against the local “chengguan,” agents of the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau. The chubby little […]
-Analysis- BEIJING—In recent years, Chinese judges have regularly become the targets of physical assault. Among the most notorious cases that have made national headlines are a Hunan farmer who sent a package of homemade explosives to a court in 2005, killing one and injuring two others; and last year, a Hubei man involved in a […]
Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was detained as part of a widespread corruption scandal at state oil giant Petrobras. But the probe could actually prove to be the spark to help him succeed Dilma Rousseff.
A new study shows income and asset inequality in China has reached epic proportions, with the top undertaxed and the bottom at grave social risk because of a lack of civil protection.
TOLIARA — The heat and the years have taken a heavy toll on Rebokane Mahatsanga’s frail, scaly-skinned body. Squatting, almost prone, among a few bad-looking ears of corn on his patch of land, he doesn’t quite know his age anymore. “I think I’ll be 100 soon,” he says, his eyes half-closed. People don’t really celebrate […]
Orphaned and forced to live on the streets at just 5, Amporn Wathanavong had a miserable childhood, and was lured to fight in the jungles along the Cambodian border. But he ultimately got an education and founded an organization to help poor orphans.
Thousands of Syrian women face not just grief but also fear and poverty after losing their husbands to war. They often endure strict control from their remaining family and are forbidden to work. Some make the heartbreaking decision to remarry.
SEOUL — Poverty among the elderly has been blamed for the growing rate of suicides among senior citizens in South Korea’s capital, where 50 seniors took their own lives last year. According to the Korea Labor Institute, 48.6% of the country’s elderly were living in poverty last year, the Korea Herald reports. The highest suicide […]
-Analysis- PARIS — The Nov. 13 attacks that saw jihadists slaughter at least 129 people in Paris raise two crucial questions: Who ordered these attacks? And who carried them out? The answer to the first is ISIS, the so-called Islamic State that spreads terror, slaughters Muslims and non-Muslims, destroys treasured monuments inherited from centuries and […]
Gustavo Petro, the former Marxist guerrilla who became Bogotá’s mayor for the poor, has left the Colombian capital a wreck. But he’s on the way in favor of a newly elected leader voters hope will put the city back on track.
Is capitalism coming to Kim Jong-un’s North Korea? According to South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo, North Koreans who got rich thanks to state-backed monopolies are being encouraged by the regime to open small banks across the capital in a bid to boost the free economy. Some of the money-lenders even have installed ATMs, though these […]
SAO PAULO — João Batista, a 45-year-old builder, has been unemployed since December. Jailson de Lima, 46, is luckier: He still manages to find construction work from time to time but doesn’t earn enough to pay rent, which has been on a relentless rise. Cristiane dos Santos, 27, lived in a hostel for some time […]
NEW YORK — I am one of those privileged people who live in New York and have the chance to escape from the city on occasion. No matter how many loops a person bikes around Central Park, riding across the George Washington Bridge, and biking along the Hudson River, it’s not until you get out […]
Persistent poverty used to be quietly endured, but protests are rising against a political leadership that long ago lost the trust of the people. Still, it is a long way from Kiev.
To the chagrin of climate change deniers, the pontiff’s environmental encyclical says there are no reasonable doubts that global warming is caused by human activity.
Despite the devastation, growing demand among foreign couples continues to feed medical tourism in Nepal, where surrogacy agencies recruit women to carry babies for infertile couples.
Categories
Millennial And Homeless, In France
Young adults between 18 and 25 are an increasingly vulnerable population in France. Jobless and rejected by their families, they are finding themselves on the streets in disturbing numbers.
The modern-day successors of ragmen, New York’s trash pickers (or “canners”) are credited with recycling 60% of the city’s glass and aluminum. Why don’t we notice this hidden economy?
Once a backer of the Free Syrian Army, a harsh reality caught up with this father of three near Aleppo.
A child goes missing in India every eight minutes. After India’s Supreme Court censured police for failing to act, authorities launched an operation to bring children home. But it’s still too little, too late.
People’s Daily (China) January 22, 2015 Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first “domestic inspection tour” of 2015 was used this week to try to boost the economy in the impoverished Yunnan Province in southwest China. The People’s Daily featured in-depth coverage and up-close photographs of Xi meeting with locals as the government seeks to rally support […]
RIO DE JANEIRO — The sign outside this modest hair salon in the Rio das Pedras favela, or shantytown, of Rio de Janeiro reads “Belos Fios” (“beautiful hair”). Inside, customers can find Matrix hair color products stacked behind the salon’s two only chairs. This is just one of some 30 small salons, most of them […]
-OpEd- DOURADOS — Large imposing walls and fences have become a compulsory part of construction plans for the luxury gated communities mushrooming all around Brazil. But there is one particularity about the Ecoville Residence in Dourados, in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul. On the other side of its three-meter electric fence sits […]