U.S. Ranks Near Bottom of UNICEF Report on Child Well-being
KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor – Salon
The cliché holds that: Our children are our future. If that is true we don't have much of a future. We don't seem to give a damn about our children and, as the UNICEF report makes clear, it shows.
The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to ‘child life satisfaction.”
Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.
The UN activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) on December 3, 2012 to carry out a rapid damage needs assessment in response to Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines. More specifically, the UN requested that Digital Humanitarians collect and geo-reference all tweets with links to pictures or video footage capturing Typhoon damage. To complete this mission, I reached out to my colleagues at CrowdCrafting. Together, we customized a microtasking app to filter, classify and geo-reference thousands of tweets. This type of rapid damage assessment request was the first of its kind, which means that setting up the appropriate workflows and technologies took a while, leaving less time for the tagging, verification and analysis of the multimedia content pointed to in the disaster tweets. Such is the nature of innovation; optimization takes place through iteration and learning.
“It leaves them with the prospect of the only way we leave Guantanamo is death,” Warner said. “Unfortunately, I think the men are ready to embrace this.”
“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”
BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: Once again, POTUS is seeking to stick it to the military via his budget.
Current issues are escalating costs for a apparently all TRICARE categories, depressed pay raises for active duty military, and restrained cost of living allowances, via “chained CPI,” for military retired pay.
Invite your attention to Military Officers Association of America's (MOAA's) graphics at links in basic message below. MOAA is going to visit Congress on 17 April to educate our elected representative. They badly need supporting e-mail fires from all of us. Hit the “Take Action” or “deliver a barrage of emails” links below to be taken to their legislative action center where they have prescripted but tailorable e-mail texts ready. Send early and often. Being a retiree, MOAA member, or even a veteran is not required. We can use help from anyone with access to a computer who can click a mouse.
Remember — those of us who are veterans and retirees at some time long ago wrote that blank check to the US Government, “payable for any amount up to and including death.” We served as directed. For those of us still surviving, it appears that the Government is abrogating its part of the deal. We can use everybody's help on this one. And the next one, the one after that, and the one after that. We have a new persistent conflict over whether or not the government will honor its past promises to military personnel.
Help MOAA Storm the Hill
Now is the time to stand up and make your voice heard to reinforce MOAA leaders' efforts on Capitol Hill next week.
On Wednesday, April 17, more than 160 national, state, and local MOAA representatives will “Storm the Hill” to visit the offices of nearly every US senator and representative.
They'll be making the case against big DoD-proposed TRICARE fee hikes, an active duty pay raise cap, and more.
There's never been a more important time to add your voice and deliver a barrage of emails to remind your legislators that MOAA's Hill-stormers are backed by thousands more of their constituents.
Let's hang together to oppose “taxing military people first.”
How We All Survived Likely the Largest Collaboration in Journalism History
One of the most frequent questions people ask us these days is “How in the world did you get 86 journalists to work together?”
Photo: Shutterstock.I can understand their puzzlement. Journalists often compete fiercely to scoop each other. When they get a great tip or a unique document they don’t sit and wonder how they can share it with as many of their colleagues around the world as possible.
Many investigative reporters are classic “lone wolves,” working in isolation and extremely protective of their work.
What we had in front of us was 2.5 million files involving offshore dealings with links to more than 170 countries and territories. Global data on a truly global issue – business dealings and money flows. It became clear very soon that we could not tackle the job effectively from our Washington office or just with the small team of reporters ICIJ initially recruited to analyze the files.
We needed to open up the game as much as possible without compromising the investigation or the sources. It was a risky approach, but we did not see any other way around it.
Last summer, ICIJ member Nicky Hager and I scrolled down the list of 160 ICIJ journalists in more than 60 countries and began to make some choices. It was one of those moments in which having this network of trusted reporters and relationships we have built overtime made a huge difference.
In countries where we didn’t have a member we sought recommendations and checked out the work of potential collaborators. We did not pick journalists based solely on their media affiliation – we were much more interested in choosing the right people, the real diggers and the most trustworthy colleagues. (See, also, How We Chose Our Offshore Reporting Partners).
U.S. Ranks Near Bottom of UNICEF Report on Child Well-being
