UN states set goal to end poverty, hunger in next 15 years, By Edith M. Lederer (AP), August 3, 2015, ABC News: “The 193 member states of the United Nations have reached agreement on a new development agenda for the next 15 years that calls for eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, improving living standards and taking urgent action to combat climate change. The draft agreement reached Sunday evening outlines 17 goals with 169 specific targets on issues ranging from ending poverty ‘in all its forms everywhere’ to ensuring quality education and affordable and reliable energy, and protecting the environment…”
Category: Environment
Post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans
Poverty worsens for African-Americans since Hurricane Katrina, Data Center reports, By Richard A. Webster, August 1, 2015, New Orleans Times-Picayune: “Despite many of the positive economic gains New Orleans made in the 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, black families continue to struggle while the gap between the rich and poor grows wider, casting a pall over the recovery. In addition, poverty is increasing in the surrounding parishes ‘undermining social cohesion and resilience capacity across the region,’ according to the Data Center. The nonprofit research organization examined income trends as part of ‘The New Orleans Index at 10,’ its report analyzing the region’s recovery since the storm…”
Lead Poisoning in Children
- Lead paint is poisoning poor Chicago kids as city cuts millions for cleanup, By Michael Hawthorne, May 1, 2015, Chicago Tribune: “Alarming levels of brain-damaging lead are poisoning more than a fifth of the children tested from some of the poorest parts of Chicago, even as the hazard has been largely eliminated in more prosperous neighborhoods, a Tribune investigation has found. The toxic legacy of lead — added to paint and gasoline for nearly a century — once threatened kids throughout the nation’s third largest city. As Chicago’s overall rate of lead poisoning steadily dropped during the past two decades, the disparities between rich and poor grew wider…”
- Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks, By Terrence McCoy, April 29, 2015, Washington Post: “The house where Freddie Gray’s life changed forever sits at the end of a long line of abandoned rowhouses in one of this city’s poorest neighborhoods. The interior of that North Carey Street house, cluttered with couches and potted plants, is lacquered in a fresh coat of paint that makes the living room glow. But it wasn’t always this way. When Gray lived here between 1992 and 1996, paint chips flaked off the walls and littered the hardwood floor, according to a 2008 lawsuit filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court. The front windowsills shed white strips of paint. It was worst in the front room, where Gray bedded down most nights with his mother, he recalled years later in a deposition…”