1 Asia’s perilous financial inequality (Khaleej Times) Forget the lines in front of those flashy fashion stores. They don’t tell the story. Beneath the shiny surface of Asia’s cities, life is far more challenging. Over the last few decades Asia has enjoyed relatively low levels of inequality. This is changing: Income disparities are now rising faster than before and increasing more sharply than elsewhere. Questions over political tensions aside, this matters for growth. First, it’s a drag on productivity. Second, it makes harmful populist policies very tempting.
Over the last several decades, Asia has delivered unprecedented growth. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty – and certainly not in such a short time. Take South Korea. In the early 1960s, the country’s per capita income was similar to that of Sudan. Today an OECD economy, South Korea turns out smartphones, chips and cars, and a taxi ride from the airport to central Seoul costs as much as anywhere in the world.
Available data show that since the early 1990s, income inequality has risen across the region (with Thailand being the lone exception). This, it might be argued, is a natural by-product of soaring prosperity. For the region as a whole, the number of people living below the internationally accepted poverty line fell from about 50% to about 25% between 1990 and 2005. Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe have delivered nowhere near such improvements. But in terms of income inequality, Asia has seen a bigger increase than others.
2 Rich man, poor man, abs miserable man (Bikram Vohra in Khaleej Times) I have no problem with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet having all those billions and if Carlos Slim has more, hey man, good luck to you. It is when your type do the dirty on you that it hurts. Few things are worse than having to congratulate people who have just been kissed by good fortune. Kissed? It is more like a drenching. Like these good friends of ours who have been with us through thick and thin (mostly wafer thin) these past fifteen years and the wonderful times we have spent together moaning and groaning about our two ends never speaking to each other and isn’t it incredible how other people are so well off and have no problems about paying their bills and going on holiday while we get into the throes of ecstasy finding an overlooked twenty dirham bill in an old coat pocket.
Anyway, after all these years, these close friends of ours sailing along on the seas of common misery have gone and knifed us in the back. They made some deal that worked out and then they sold their business and now they are rich. I do not like people who can afford it. Especially people who could not afford it just the other day and shared this kinship with us, that was our common ground. Now, his wife buys diamonds by the carat. I am miserable, I say, traitors, that’s what they are. It is so unfair, isn’t it, when this happens to your friends and you feel like one of those long distance runners who have been lapped and are not quite sure why you are still in the race.
3 Yes, there is a Men’s Day (Dawn) It is perhaps hard to believe, but there is an equivalent to the internationally-celebrated Women’s Day. International Men’s Day recently passed by on November 19th, and many of us didn’t even know. In 2011, the celebrated theme for International Men’s Day was ‘Giving Boys the Best Possible Start in Life’, and its main objectives focused on male healthcare, and celebrating their contributions to family, marriage and childcare, but above all, rejoiced manhood.
So what is International Men’s Day? Calls for an international day for men began in the 60s, with special focus on men and their contributions and concerns which deserve a day for recognition. Unfortunately, initiatives to celebrate this day publicly in large numbers did not kick off really well, and the idea fizzled out. It wasn’t then until the early 90s that interest in the event was revived, and organisations with a focus on men’s rights marked the day on November 19th, receiving better response than before. Over the years, several themes have emerged including peace in 2002, positive male role models in 2009, and children’s future in 2010. On the official International Men’s Day website, developing countries including Haiti, India, Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana and Malta are all listed as active participants – but Pakistan is nowhere to be seen.
4 Good Lord! Churches face foreclosure (Reuters) Banks are foreclosing on America's churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data. The surge in church foreclosures represents a new wave of distressed property seizures triggered by the 2008 financial crash, with many banks no longer willing to grant struggling religious organizations forbearance. Since 2010, 270 churches have been sold after defaulting on their loans, with 90% of those sales coming after a lender-triggered foreclosure, according to the real estate information company CoStar Group.
In 2011, 138 churches were sold by banks, an annual record, with no sign that these religious foreclosures are abating, according to CoStar. That compares to just 24 sales in 2008 and only a handful in the decade before. Church defaults differ from residential foreclosures. Most of the loans in question are not 30-year mortgages but rather commercial loans that typically mature after just five years when the full balance becomes due immediately. During the property boom, many churches took out additional loans to refurbish or enlarge. Then after the financial crash, many churchgoers lost their jobs, donations plunged, and often, so did the value of the church building. There are more than 300,000 churches in the United States.
5 Half of UK young blacks jobless (The Guardian) More than half of young black men available for work in Britain are now unemployed, according to unpublished government statistics obtained by the Guardian which show the recession is hitting young black people disproportionately hard. The new figures, which do not include students, also reveal that the youth unemployment rate for black people has increased at almost twice the rate for white 16- to 24-year-olds since the start of the recession in 2008. Young black men are the worst affected of all, according to a gender breakdown contained within the data supplied by the Office for National Statistics. Unemployment among young black men has doubled in three years, rising from 28.8% in 2008 to 55.9% in the last three months of 2011.
6 In Chad, the hungry raid anthills for food (BBC) Urgent action is needed to stop drought in West Africa's Sahel region turning into a humanitarian disaster affecting 13 million people, Oxfam says. The charity says the international community waited too long to respond to famine in East Africa last year. Oxfam has launched a $36m emergency appeal to help reach more than a million of the most vulnerable. Oxfam said malnutrition rates across Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and northern Senegal are hovering between 10% and 15%, and in some areas have risen beyond the emergency threshold level of 15%. It says that more than one million children in the Sahel region are at risk of severe malnutrition. In parts of Chad, Oxfam says, some villagers are digging up ant hills to gather grain that the ants have stored.
7 Dishonesty in India (Strapline for a feature in The Hindu, about the killing this week of an Indian Police Service officer by the mining mafia: Dishonest and rapacious elements have gained such an upper hand that officers who defend the public interest do so at their peril.)
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