Please join me and over 9,000 human rights organisations, lawyers, doctors, researchers and artists who have signed an open letter calling on the Australian Government to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake by at least 20,000 people, and expedite the resettlement of interpreters, guides and other personnel involved in Australia’s mission in Afghanistan.
Continue reading Action For AfghanistanIn the Howard years Australia became a much meaner and more self-interested country … We are the richest people per capita in the world, if you just look in material terms, and we are the richest people ever to live on the Earth… Yet there’s this air of dissatisfaction and a feeling that we are being cheated, and that is a cultural shift that came out of the Howard years and has been promoted mightily by the Murdoch media — and that flows on through the ABC and all the other radio shock jocks and so on….
People voted for that with their eyes wide open [on the removal of environmental policies]. And I might add to that, that they voted for $4 billion dollars in foreign aid to be not spent.
Himalayas: A senior political sociologist and his multidisciplinary team of researchers have called for systematic evaluation to understand why foreign aid is failing to improve the economy.
Foreign aid finances 60% of development programmes and it is seen as a “necessary evil,” however these researchers aim to assess how aid is being spent and how to enable the state to provide better services. Continue reading Foreign Aid Failing to Improve the Economy
Irena Sendler was a Polish Roman-Catholic nurse and social worker who headed the children’s section of Żegota, an underground resistance group working against the German occupation in Warsaw. Continue reading Irena Sendler: Social Worker and Humanitarian
Head to the BBC to hear Dr Alice Bunn from the UK Space Agency discuss how international collaboration between space agencies has assisted over 300 natural disasters in over 100 countries, including the Haiti and Japanese disasters.. This is known as the Disasters Charter.
Satellites have been useful in identifying other potential environmental threats, such as deforestation and illegal logging in Brazil, and it is also vital for research in difficult to reach terrains, such as the Antarctic.
Six months after donors poured money and aid into the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, aid groups are warning the situation remains dire. Dadaab is the world’s biggest refugee settlement, with almost half a million Somalis living in their neighbouring country. Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste is the first journalist to visit the camp since the security crisis began last October.
Via Al Jazeera English YouTube.
The Other Sociologist 