Category Archives: Inequality

As order is restored in Kazakhstan, its future remains murky

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The tragic events of last week, in which dozens lost their lives, have exposed hidden political tensions

For many Kazakhs, the full story behind the unrest of the past week remains as murky as the mist that enveloped Almaty, the country’s largest city and the centre of violence, at the same time.

People were unable to access accurate information, as an internet blackout froze almost all access to the outside world during a tragic few days of violence in which military vehicles rolled through the streets, government buildings burned and state television carried rolling threats that “bandits and terrorists” would be eliminated without mercy.

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Requiring PCR tests for isolation funds may fail legal test, UK officials told

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Legal advice says any challenge under equalities law would have reasonable chance of success

Government lawyers have said any legal challenge against making low-paid people take confirmatory PCR tests to get financial support during isolation would stand a high chance of success, the Guardian has learned.

Legal advice circulated within the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) is understood to warn that there is a risk of a challenge under equalities law.

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‘They want to remove us and take the rock’, say Zimbabweans living near Chinese-owned mines

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As companies extract wealth, villagers say they see little benefit and are instead exploited in quarries, live in homes damaged by blasts and are unable to farm polluted land

A convoy of trucks laden with huge black granite rocks trundles along the dusty pathway as a group of villagers look on grimly.

Every day more than 60 trucks take granite for export along this rugged road through Nyamakope village in the district of Mutoko, 90 miles east of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

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Filipinos count cost of climate crisis as typhoons get ever more destructive

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The Philippines adds little to global emissions but faces some of its worst effects in extreme weather. Climate justice is needed

A few days before Christmas, Super-typhoon Rai – known locally as Odette – ravaged the Philippines. The morning after the onslaught, on my way back to Iloilo City from San Jose, Antique, I could see the ocean still boiling; houses blown away and great trees knocked down, making roads impassable. The sights were terrifying.

Lost lives continue to climb two weeks on. Vast numbers of buildings were destroyed – from houses to schools; food crops lost to flooding. At first, I did not know what to feel – anger, helplessness? Later, I knew what I wanted: climate justice.

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More than half of UK’s black children live in poverty, analysis shows

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Exclusive: Labour party research also finds black children at least twice as likely to grow up poor as white children

More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty, a new analysis of official data has revealed.

Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children, according to the Labour party research, which was based on government figures for households that have a “relative low income” – defined as being below 60% of the median, the standard definition for poverty.

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Haiti’s New Year’s Day soup has made headlines. But let’s not be naive about its symbolism

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Sharing soup joumou on 1 January represents what Haitians bring to the world – but remembering that inequality prevails is arguably more important

Whispers. Curfews. Never-ending military parades and shows of arms. Opponents’ bodies exposed for children to see as some sort of macabre art. And always, that nasal voice of “Papa Doc”, François Duvalier, chanting on all radio stations. Those were the days of my childhood under a dictator in Haiti.

But on 1 January, Independence Day, there were three things that made a difference.

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The Guardian view on Africa rising: the continent must develop in its own way | Editorial

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African nations have huddled together in face of climate and Covid storms. They must make that unity pay off for their citizens

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” So opens Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Set in London and Paris during the late 1700s and the lead-up to the French Revolution, the novel was a warning about what happens when wealth funnels upwards while the masses stagnate. Nowhere do the best and worst of times collide with more geopolitical force than in Africa.

African writers swept the board for literature awards from the Nobel to the Booker, while seven out of eight children in the continent’s sub-Saharan region are unable to read by the age of 10. This year the continent was home to the slowest internet speeds on the planet, as African judges granted the world’s first patent given to a robot inventor. About 50 million Africans are expected to fall into extreme poverty in 2021, when the continent’s richest billionaires have seen their wealth increase by a fifth.

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From criminal to ‘teacher’: the ex-gangster tackling crime in Nairobi

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One of the city’s most wanted, Peter Wainaina was given a second chance and used it to turn his life around and help others find different path out of poverty

At the entrance of Kibagare, a slum in Nairobi’s outskirts, boots of dead gangsters dangle from electricity wires that hover over ramshackle homes of wood and iron sheets.

With little state protection from crime, angry local people will often take the law into their own hands and beat an offender who is caught in the act, sometimes to death.

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The world on screen: the best movies from Africa, Asia and Latin America

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From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases

The Great Indian Kitchen

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‘A breakthrough, not a breakdown’: one woman’s quest to transform mental health care in India

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Psychologist Ratnaboli Ray’s recovery from a mental health crisis inspired her to fight for women suffering in ‘abysmal’ conditions in West Bengal’s state institutions

  • Photography by Ranita Roy for the Guardian

Ratnaboli Ray regards one of the lowest points of her life as a breakthrough. After years in an arranged marriage in which she felt stifled and trapped, her mental health took a catastrophic turn in 1997, when she was in her mid-30s.

“I was feeling very caged, I was not able to express myself,” she says, from her home in West Bengal, India. She describes the psychological symptoms as like a pressure cooker bursting. “I used to get angry, have weeping spells. I was neglectful of my young son.”

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WHO boss: western countries’ Covid booster drives likely to prolong pandemic

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Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says there will be enough vaccines for world’s adults – if they are not hoarded

The world will have enough doses of Covid vaccines early next year to inoculate all of the global adult population – if western countries do not hoard those vaccines to use in blanket booster programmes, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday there would be sufficient vaccine supplies in global circulation in the first quarter of 2022.

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‘Nothing will help’: Tunisians trapped in poverty lose hope

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Eleven years after the start of the Arab spring, those trying to survive rising prices, unemployment and a pandemic feel little has changed

For a decade, Tunisia’s revolution has been remembered on 14 January, the day autocratic ruler Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and the political elite declared the revolution complete.

From today, by President Kais Saied’s decree, the event will be marked on 17 December, the day street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at state corruption and the faltering economy. The self-immolation became a catalyst for Tunisia’s uprising and the wider Arab spring.

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Top toddy: Sri Lanka’s tree tapping trade reaches new heights

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‘Toddy tappers’ who collect sap used in everything from palm wine to ice-cream are enjoying a boost to business that has revived the traditional skill and improved their quality of life

The palmyra palm tree with its wide fan leaves is a distinctive and common sight across Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, thriving in the arid conditions.

Kutty, who goes by only one name, is a “toddy tapper”. Climbing the palms with his clay pot, he collects sap from the flower heads at the top of the great trees, which can grow to more than 30 metres (90ft). The sap is fermented to make toddy, an alcoholic drink also known as palm wine.

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‘We have to use a boat to commute’: coastal Ghana hit by climate crisis

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As the sea claims more of the west African shoreline, those left homeless by floods are losing hope that the government will act

Waves have taken the landscape John Afedzie knew so well. “The waters came closer in the last few months, but now they have destroyed parts of schools and homes. The waves have taken the whole of the village. One needs to use a boat to commute now because of the rising sea levels,” he says.

Afedzie lives in Keta, one of Ghana’s coastal towns, where a month ago high tide brought seawater flooding into 1,027 houses, according to the government, leaving him among about 3,000 people made homeless overnight.

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Helping refugees starving in Poland’s icy border forests is illegal – but it’s not the real crime | Anna Alboth

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The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle

One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.

Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.

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‘She didn’t deserve to die’: Kenya fights tuberculosis in Covid’s shadow

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For the first time in a decade deaths from TB are rising, with the curable disease killing 20,000 Kenyans last year. Now testing ‘ATMs’ and other innovations are helping to find ‘missing cases’

One day in May last year, Violet Chemesunte, a community health volunteer in Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi, got a call from a colleague worried about a woman she had visited who kept coughing.

She asked if Chemesunte could go round and convince the 37-year-old woman, a single mother to three young children, to seek medical help. She suspected tuberculosis (TB), and feared it might already be too late.

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Even after 40 years the response to Aids in many countries is still held back by stigma | Hakima Himmich and Mike Podmore

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It is hard to protect yourself from HIV when having sterile syringes or condoms can lead to arrest: discrimination is restricting progress in eliminating HIV

Forty years after the first cases of Aids were discovered, goals for its global elimination have yet to be achieved. In 2020, nearly 700,000 people died of Aids-related illnesses and 1.5 million people were newly infected with HIV.

This is despite scientific and medical advances in the testing, treatment and care of people living with HIV.

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Perth mother may have to quit work to care for autistic son after NDIS package cut by 70%

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Labor accuses Coalition of ‘stealth’ cuts to disability funding as other families complain about recent changes

A Perth mother fears she will have to quit her job to care for her autistic son after his national disability insurance scheme package was cut by about 70%, in the latest example of what the opposition is labelling “stealth” cuts to the program.

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) insists there is no “directive to reduce funding to NDIS participant plans” and that its so-called Sustainability Action Taskforce – dubbed a razor gang by critics – is “no longer active”.

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Blowing the house down: life on the frontline of extreme weather in the Gambia

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A storm took the roof off Binta Bah’s house before torrential rain destroyed her family’s belongings, as poverty combines with the climate crisis to wreak havoc on Africa’s smallest mainland country

The windstorm arrived in Jalambang late in the evening, when Binta Bah and her family were enjoying the evening cool outside. “But when we first heard the wind, the kids started to run and go in the house,” she says.

First they went in one room but the roof – a sheet of corrugated iron fixed only by a timbere pole – flew off. They ran into another but the roof soon went there too.

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Migrant caravan and Qatar’s tarnished World Cup: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

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