World Bank: the world is poorer than we thought

Source: The World Bank

The World Bank said improved economic estimates showed there were more poor people around the world than previously thought while also revealing big successes in the fight to overcome extreme poverty. The new estimates, which reflect improvements in internationally comparable price data, offer a much more accurate picture of the cost of living in developing countries and set a new poverty line of US$1.25 a day. They are based on the results of the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP), released earlier this year.

China: Olympic sponsors ignore human rights abuses

Source: Human Rights Watch

The major corporate sponsors of the Beijing Olympics have failed to uphold their own principles of corporate social responsibility, Human Rights Watch said today. Sponsors have failed to speak out – either individually or collectively – about human rights abuses linked to the Beijing Games, and should be prepared to support the establishment of a permanent body inside the International Olympic Committee to monitor rights abuses at future Olympics.

From tragedy to hope: the U.N. in Iraq

Source: United Nations Information Centre, Washington DC | OpEd by B. Lynn Pascoe*

Today, the United Nations marks the five-year anniversary of one of the darkest and most painful days in our 60-year history: the suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad in the chaotic first days of the post-war insurgency in Iraq .

New York Times OpEd: For terrorists, a war on aid groups

Source: New York Times | by Samantha Power

Five years ago, at roughly 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 19, 2003, in Baghdad, a suicide bomber in a flatbed truck pulled up outside the lightly fortified office of the United Nations’s leading diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and detonated a cone-shaped bomb the size of a large man. The bomb was laced with hand grenades and mortars, and it carried more than a thousand pounds of explosives. Its force was so fierce that it shook the American-controlled Green Zone, three miles away.

The stigma factor: biggest hurdle to combat HIV/AIDS

Source: UN News Center

Prejudice against people living with HIV/AIDS makes them afraid to speak out and allows the disease to make its deadly impact around the globe, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today. “Stigma remains the single most important barrier to public action. It is the main reason too many people are afraid to see a doctor to determine whether they have the disease, or to seek treatment,” Mr. Ban writes in an op-ed article in The Washington Times.

Book review: The way of the world, a story of truth and hope in an age of extremism

Source: MSNBC | by Bob Considine

President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims. The charge is made in “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, released today.