News of the World

200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank remain unconnected to a water network and 95 per cent of water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption due to high levels of pollution. Palestinians live on 50 litres of water a day while Israeli settlers enjoy 280 litres. Israel over-extracts water from underground aquifers located in the West Bank for its own citizens and also sells back some of the water to water-short Palestinians at a high price. Water is at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Water remains one of the five issues up for debate to reach a final peace agreement alongside the status of Jerusalem, refugees, borders and the Israeli settlements.

Three weeks ago, Israeli soldiers armed with a truck and a digger entered the Palestinian village of Amniyr and destroyed nine water tanks. One week later, Israeli forces demolished water wells and water pumps in the villages of Al-Nasaryah, Al-Akrabanyah and Beit Hassan in the Jordan Valley.

"The environment can't wait for a final peace agreement," declared Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME).

Mexico's poverty rate jumped from 44.5 percent to 48.8 percent from 2008 to 2010. The number of people below the poverty line in Mexico rose by 3.2 million between 2008 and 2010 to 52 million, or 46.2 percent of the country's more than 112 million inhabitants, the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, or Coneval, said. The increase in poverty had to do mainly with a drop in income and reduced access to food, primarily due to the global recession and spikes in the price of commodities, Coneval's executive secretary, Gonzalo Hernandez, said. the poorest 50 percent of urban dwellers seeing their incomes fall by 7.2 percent between 2008 and 2010. The economic situation of Mexico's roughly 10 million indigenous people also deteriorated.
Coneval categorizes an individual as poor if he or she suffers deprivations in one or more indicators such as access to health care, food and housing, and earns less than 2,100 pesos ($179) a month in urban areas or less than 1,300 pesos ($111) per month in rural zones. People living in extreme poverty suffer deprivations in three or more indicators and have income of less than 978 pesos ($83.50) a month in urban areas or less than 684 pesos ($58.40) a month in the rural sector.

People living in Northern Ireland suffer some of the worst poverty in western Europe. The Price of Being Poor, a report released by the Consumer Council, revealed that those who earn the least are forced to pay more for everyday goods. Consumers living in Northern Ireland are forced to pay more for essential goods such as fuel, insurance, transport and heating oil, problems are compounded for working people who receive £39 less in average weekly earnings than people living in England, Scotland or Wales.
It reveals that one of the country's biggest problems is fuel poverty - of which Northern Ireland has some of the highest rates in western Europe. It is estimated the number of households affected has jumped to 300,000 (44%) in recent years. Consumer Council chiefs believe that figure may even have risen to over 50% this year and claim a lack of heating fuel could have led to the deaths of up to 950 people, mostly elderly, last winter.


Namibia and Africa at large, is characterised by huge gaps of inequalities, be it social or economic. The gap between the 'haves and have nots' is bigger than a giant elephant and continues to grow even bigger.
Namibia has a huge income distribution gap. The gap is likely to widen given that, according to the Labour survey of 2008, almost half of Namibian households (47%) rely on wages and salaries as their main source of income. In urban areas, this figure was as high as 74%, compared to 27% in rural areas, where 38% of households depend on subsistence farming as the main source of income. Inequality is also spread across other sectors such as gender. According to the Human Development report for 2010, "in Namibia, 27% of parliamentary seats are held by women and 50 % of adult women have a secondary or higher level of education compared to 46% of their male counterparts."

Seventeen years after apartheid ended, miners feel little has changed to improve their lives and many live in debt. Miners in South Africa's biggest industry say their pay has not kept up with fast-rising food, fuel and electricity prices. Adding insult to injury, in their eyes, their raises pale in comparison to that of executives at the top 40 blue-chip companies. Accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers said the median salaries of executive directors of the top 40 companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange rose 23 percent to 4.8 million rand last year, while their short-term incentives rose by 58 percent to 3.8 million rand. South Africa's Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, stood at 0.67 in 2008, according to government figures, one of the highest in the world, and has worsened since white minority rule ended in 1994.