By Simon Kuper 27 March 2019 (Financial Times) – In the flat where I stayed in Cape Town last month, the bathtub felt like a relic of a lost civilisation. It may never be used again. Beside it was a shower containing an egg timer. The two-minute wash has been standard here since the recent […]
NEW YORK, 20 March 2019 – As in 2018, Finland again takes the top spot as the happiest country in the world according to three years of surveys taken by Gallup from 2016-2018. Rounding out the rest of the top ten are countries that have consistently ranked among the happiest. They are in order: Denmark, […]
By Ishaan Tharoor20 March 2019 (The Washington Post) – We don’t know how many people have died since Cyclone Idai made landfall last Thursday on the coast of Mozambique before barreling west into Zimbabwe and Malawi. Aerial photography and drone footage have shown the apocalyptic scenes left in the cyclone’s wake: Fields of crops were […]
By Alexandre Tanzi 5 March 2019 (Bloomberg) – U.S. credit card debt hit $870 billion — the largest amount ever — as of December 2018, according to the data from the Federal Reserve. Credit card balances rose by $26 billion from the prior quarter. “The increase in credit card balances is consistent with seasonal patterns […]
GANDHINAGAR, 28 February 2019 (Press Trust of India) – Nearly 50 per cent of the country is currently facing drought with at least 16 per cent falling in the “exceptional” or “extreme” category, according to IIT Gandhinagar scientists managing India’s real time drought prediction system. This ongoing drought will pose a lot of challenges in […]
By Oliver Milman 21 February 2019 (The Guardian) – The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins. But in the past three months, half of these recyclables have been loaded on to trucks, taken to a hulking incineration facility and burned, according […]
By Rebecca McCarthy 11 February 2019 (Longreads) – Atlantic City covers the northern third of Absecon Island, a barrier island made up of an alarming amount of sand. It is a bad town to die in — there are plenty of vacant lots but no cemeteries. In many places, if you dig down more than […]
By Heather Long 12 February 2019 (The Washington Post) – A record 7 million Americans are 90 days or more behind on their auto loan payments, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported Tuesday, even more than during the wake of the financial crisis. Economists warn that this is a red flag. Despite the […]
By Christopher Ingraham 8 February 2019 (The Washington Post) – The 400 richest Americans — the top 0.00025 percent of the population — have tripled their share of the nation’s wealth since the early 1980s, according to a new working paper on wealth inequality by University of California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman.Those 400 Americans […]
By Nicole Acevedo 5 February 2019 (NBC News) – Nearly a million and half people in Puerto Rico face deep cuts in food assistance, or losing it completely, if the federal government doesn’t provide funding for the Nutrition Assistance Program, which is expected to run out of money on the island next month.According to an […]
