Free Republic

NEW YORK, Nov 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Climate change opponents plan to stage a hunger strike to demand a meeting with U.S. Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, they said on Tuesday, in the political battle over global warming. The protesters said they want a one-hour on-camera meeting with Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to discuss reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025. "You have yet to pass even symbolic legislation recognizing the climate crisis as a national emergency. With all due respect, you have failed," they said in an open letter. "Meet with us or leave...

The massive Baby Boomer generation which brought America the happiness of rock & roll and the Ford Mustang en masse is poised to trigger a surge in a scourge: Senior hunger.

Over the past half-decade or so it’s become fashionable to claim that millions of Americans, including many families with kids, are mired in “extreme poverty” — they’re not just below the poverty line, and they’re not even in “deep poverty,” defined at half the poverty line; they’re making do on less than $2 per person per day, the kind of threshold we use to measure deprivation in the Third World.I wrote last year about some research led by the American Enterprise Institute’s Bruce Meyer that devastates these claims — research that he and three coauthors have now expanded and updated....

In the coming weeks, thousands of college students will walk across a stage and proudly accept their diplomas. Many of them will be hungry. A senior at Lehman College in the Bronx dreams of starting her day with breakfast. An undergraduate at New York University said he has been so delirious from hunger, he’s caught himself walking down the street not realizing where he’s going. A health sciences student at Stony Brook University on Long Island describes “poverty naps,” where she decides to go to sleep rather than deal with her hunger pangs. These are all examples of food insecurity,...

**SNIP** Venezuela is ‘an ice cube’ The end result of the country’s decline, in terms of society, has been extreme poverty and hunger. In 2017, the average Venezuelan citizen lost around 24 pounds in 2017, about 73 people were murdered a day. And the rule of law is also breaking down: According to the country’s Prosecutor General’s office, 98% of crimes in 2014 were not prosecuted. Hyperinflation and the introduction of President Nicolas Maduro’s unique cryptocurrency has made the bolivar essentially worthless. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) noted that three million Venezuelans have sought refuge, hoping to find a...

Around 80 percent of Venezuelans are now short of food, according to the new data compiled by NGO Human Rights Watch on Tuesday. Following a trip to the Venezuelan border with Brazil by a team of health experts from John Hopkins University, researchers found that malnutrition continues to rise aggressively, with 80 percent of households unable to access enough food and rates of malnutrition among five years now over the World Health Organization’s crisis limit. In 2017, the average person lost around 11 kilos (24 pounds). In 2016, that number was 19 pounds; it is expected to have risen in...

The longtime family-owned Chicago grocery chain Treasure Island Foods informed employees last week that it will permanently shut down its six remaining locations next month. “Unfortunately, given the current industry conditions, it has been impossible for us to continue to operate without losing money.”

The committee that monitors sanctions on North Korea for the UN Security Council approved new U.S.-backed guidelines Monday to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to millions of hungry and impoverished civilians. The guidelines were crafted by U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and experts with the U.S. mission to the UN as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea remain high. Despite the new guidance on humanitarian aid, "the United States has been very clear that we will continue to enforce the current sanctions until we achieve the final, fully verified, denuclearization of North Korea," a U.S. official told CBS News...

The hundred-some billion dollars that President Obama sent to Iran apparently has come and gone, leaving the Iranian economy once again desperate to avoid collapse.  The pallets containing more than a billion dollars in hard currency have funded terror groups, and the rest of the haul apparently has gone to pay for debts, spending, and graft, leaving the real economy gasping for air, unable to generate hard currency yet dependent on imports. Steve Hanke reports at Forbes: Iran's rial plunged from 98,000 IRR/USD on Saturday to 112,000 IRR/USD on Sunday on Tehran's Ferdowsi Street.  That stunning 12.5% one-day plunge has pushed the...

Owing in large part to the generosity of the American taxpayer, worldwide starvation and chronic hunger have dropped notably. According to estimates by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the number of undernourished people in the world fell by over 100 million from 2003 to 2016. While we’re making progress in the global fight against hunger, clearly much more needs to be done. Congress enacted the Global Food Security Act (GFSA) in 2016 to help countries achieve food security, self-sufficiency, and, ultimately, political stability. Joined by Rep. Betty McCollum (DFL-MN), I recently introduced the bill to reauthorize the GFSA...

The newspaper highlights a growing stray dog problem plaguing the streets of Venezuela’s cities this week, triggered by impoverished residents unable to afford dog food and vaccines releasing their animals into the wild. Most of the dogs are starving and taking over garbage-lined street corners, blocking Venezuelans who scavenge for their own food there. Stray dogs were already a problem in major cities, and reports from as far back as 2016 indicate that the nation’s poorest hunt and eat these dogs. In January, a non-governmental organization (NGO) found that many Venezuelans, unable to afford food for themselves anymore, were buying...

Those who are unfamiliar with Venezuela’s unprecedented economic collapse might be surprised to learn that the country’s oil production has only slowed, even as the price of a barrel of crude has risen in most international markets. Unsurprisingly (it’s Venezuela), there’s a macabre explanation for this phenomenon: The workers at PDVSA – Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, which once showered Venezuelans with oil wealth – are literally collapsing due to hunger and exhaustion as workers defy their government handlers and flee their jobs in their desperation as the value of their pay has been completely erased. Bloomberg spoke with several workers...

-snip- As these stories show — and as I have seen during my 16 visits to North Korea in the past decade — hunger remains a way of life there. Forty-one percent of North Koreans, about 10.5 million people, are undernourished, and 28 percent of children under 5 years old have stunted growth. When my 4-year-old daughter visited Pyongyang in 2013, she, all of three feet, towered over children twice her age. The hunger is devastating. And it’s our fault. Led by the United States, the international community is crippling North Korea’s economy. In August and September, the United Nations...

If you sit down at a major national restaurant chain nowadays, you might be greeted by a sign, banner, or tabletop tent quoting some questionable statistics, and warning you that there is hunger in America. They quote a study (out of context) reporting that one in six American children “experiences” hunger at least sometimes. “That’s 13 million children, the population of Illinois” as the tabletop tent at lunch exclaimed to me, constantly, as I ate my lunch. This brings to mind a flood of questions, among them: Is it true? If so, Why? And What can or should we do...

North Korea spends about a quarter of its budget on the armed forces but is reportedly unable to feed its soldiers. A Japanese filmmaker who is in close contact with citizen journalists inside North Korea said that many of the army’s 1.2 million active troops are “in poor physical condition and in no fit state to fight.” “For one thing, there are too many soldiers to feed,” Jiro Ishimaru told the Guardian, “and corruption is rife, so that by the time senior military officers have taken their share of food provisions to sell for profit on the private market, there...

MARACAIBO, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela authorities are investigating the theft of animals from a zoo in western state of Zulia that were likely snatched to be eaten, a further sign of hunger in a country struggling with chronic food shortages. A police official said two collared peccaries, which are similar in appearance to boars, were stolen over the weekend from the Zulia Metropolitan Zoological Park in the sweltering city of Maracaibo near the Colombian border. "What we presume is that they (were taken) with the intention of eating them," Luis Morales, an official for the Zulia division of the National...

The United States is a nation built on the values of equal opportunity, hard work and self-determination. It prides itself on the belief that in this land of opportunity any woman, man and child should be able to reach their full potential. The challenge is to create the environment in which people can thrive. That includes a strong social compact in which government, business and the social (non-profit) sector invest in the well-being of individuals and families and ensure pathways to opportunity and success. At the most basic level that begins with ensuring access to life's basic needs, including quality,...

US Ambassador Nikki Haley has called for international action to address the crisis in Venezuela, after a US-backed proposal for regional mediation failed to win support at the Organization of American States. (The US-backed proposal failed to overcome opposition from the 14 similar national jurisdictions that benefit from turmoil and discounted Venezuelan oil.) "The tragic situation in Venezuela calls out for action. The Venezuelan people are starving while their government tramples their democracy". //Snipp// The Judiciary has sold out and military command is wavering as the country, pummeled by the plunge in oil prices and the Hugo Chávez, legacy of...

A group of Yale University graduate students announced Tuesday evening that they would be undertaking a hunger strike to pressure the administration into granting them better union benefits. The strike is taking place in front of University President Peter Salovey’s home. "Yale wants to make us wait and wait and wait … until we give up and go away," the eight members of the graduate student union Local 33 announced. "We have committed ourselves to waiting without eating."

As a massive hunger strike among Palestinian prisoners in Israel reached its fourth day, right-wing Israeli activists held a barbecue outside the Ofer Prison in an attempt to break their willpower. Thursday’s event was organized by the National Union political party youth group, which hoped that the smell of the food would entice the 1,187 hunger strikers to eat. The strike was launched by 57-year-old imprisoned Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five consecutive life sentences for murder. His strike was announced in a controversial op-ed for the New York Times, where he accused Israel of torture. “Having spent...