Haider Rizvi
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2008 (IPS) – How many Iraqi civilians have lost their lives as a result of gunshots and bombings since the U.S. military invaded that oil-rich Arab nation nearly five years ago?
The sole of a shoe lies abandoned along the so-called Highway of Death between between Kuwait and Basra. Credit: Christiaan Briggs
Credible estimates for the period March 2003 until June 2006 …
José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Mar 20 2008 (IPS) – Thousands of people who eke out a living by selling recyclable trash scavenged from the municipal dump in the Nicaraguan capital are staging a protest over control of the city s waste, blocking access to the dump by the garbage trucks.
As a result, garbage has been piling up on the streets of Managua for almost three weeks now, putting the city s 1.6 million inhabitants at risk of disease outbreaks.
Some 1,600 waste pickers who comb through the garbage in the huge La Chureca city dump, on the northwest outskirts of Managua, for scrap material to sell began the protest on Mar. 1. They accuse local authorities of encouraging municipal employees to sell recyclable material themselves to formal sector companies that pay taxes…
Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 19 2010 (IPS) – The United Nations, which has come under heavy fire for its relatively slow relief efforts in earthquake-devastated Haiti, hit back at the international news media for sensational reporting.
Haitians displaced by the powerful earthquake receive water out of a truck in the Canapé-Vert area of Hai…
Subjective wellbeing and income are intricately linked
NEW DELHI, India, Feb 19 2021 (IPS) – The question whether the rich are more satisfied with their lives is often taken for granted, even though surveys, like the Gallup World Poll, show that the relationship between subjective well-being and income is often weak, except in low-income countries in Africa and South Asia. Researcher Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators, for example, report that the correlation between household income and reported life satisfaction or happiness with life typically ranges from 0.15 to 0.30. There are a few plausible reasons. First, growth in income mostly has a transitory effect on individuals’ reported life satisfaction, as they adapt to material goods. Second, relative income, rather than the…