The Multicultural: December 2008

More slaves on the planet now than ever in human history!

E. Benjamin Skinner writes on how simple one can purchase a child from Haiti where 300,000 children are in domestic bondage:

Children in batey la esperanza, a camp for forced labour and slaves on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. keep reading...

Bush shoe attack

Why couldn't it just catch him?
A shoe in the face, a huge Muslim insult hurled at George W. Bush at a Baghdad news conference.

"This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic as he threw his shoes. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

...And now Tikrit, Iraq unveils a fiberglass and copper statue sculpted by Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari. He described it as a tribute to the pride of the Iraqi people.

Universal declaration of human rights

And there's so many living without these...

A living symbol of this declaration Aung San Suu Kyi is Burma’s democratically elected Prime minister. A military government has ruled Burma since 1962. The opposition party won the last general elections in 1990. But military leaders never recognized the results of that race and instead have kept her under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years.

The Arithmetic of compassion - David Ulansey

Practical number crunching over at Reality sandwich. What would be an equal share of world resources?

David Ulansay writes: Ever since I was a child, I have been searching for a certain number: namely, the figure for the annual Gross World Product (GWP). The GWP is the value of all goods and services produced each year by the entire human species, and the reason I was searching for this number as a child is that I wanted to take it and divide it by the number of people in the world, so that I would know what each human being was actually entitled to if the world's resources were divided fairly and equitably. keep reading ...