Awaz Apni

Homeless encampments dubbed "tent cities" are springing up across the US, partly in response to soaring numbers of home repossessions, the credit crunch and rising unemployment, according to a report. Homelessness , car camps and tent cities are certainly not new , but they are growing rapidly. In Reno, Nevada, the state with the nation's highest repossessions rate, a tent city recently sprung up on the city's outskirts and quickly filled up with about 150 people. Many, such as Sylvia Flynn, 51, who came from northern California, ended up homeless after losing their jobs and home. Officials say they do not know how many homeless the city has. "But we do know that the soup kitchens are serving hundreds more meals a day and that we have more people who are homeless than we can remember," Jodi Royal-Goodwin, the city's redevelopment agency director, said. In California, the upmarket city of Santa Barbara is housing homeless people who live in their cars in ...

I like this magazine and it seems they are looking for submissions for their upcoming edition "How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession" What if the economic recession we're presently experiencing is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back our footprint to a more sustainable level? How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing our society and economy around conservation and community well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit? The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental transformation in every aspect of our lives -- our jobs, our homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc. It's certainly beyond the scope of a single issue of Briarpatch to describe, but in our July/August 2009 ...

Usually the Toronto Star has pretty decent writing, but this was one of the poorest pieces I've seen in a while. There are some good points made, but the headline ("In shrinking workforce, women may surpass men") is misleading, and the writing jumps around without leading to any reasonable conclusion. Perhaps this is nitpicky, but there is some sloppy math here. The article claims "there's a possibility women will soon outnumber men in the job force." The numbers quoted in the same article don't really bear that out, unless you define "soon" as "probably never". According to StatsCan, there were 7,295,900 men with full-time jobs in January 2005 and 6,297,400 women working full-time. By January 2008, that number had dropped to 7,186,800 for men and to 5,339,200 for women. And as of last month, it fell further, to 7,095,000 full-time jobs for men and slightly for women, to 5,339,000 full-time positions. So the trend shows in the longe...