Palestinian newborns are dying at checkpoints

This was an article in New Internationalist Magazine.

Palestinian newborns are dying at checkpoints
Posted by Libby Powell | 3


In their home just outside of Bethlehem, a young couple, Farid and Nadia, put their son to bed. First-time parents, they tiptoe in and out of his nursery. The view from the window is dominated by the drab grey slabs of the Separation Wall, which stands just 20 metres from the house.

‘I fear that he will grow up thinking this is normal,’ Farid says.

Nadia is a Jerusalem ID holder. Farid, however, only holds a green West Bank ID card and is prohibited from owning property or driving a car in the district.

‘The night that my wife went into labour,

’ Farid recalls,

‘we made our way to hospital. Because I wasn’t allowed to drive I had to sit beside her. She was in severe pain. I thought she was going to deliver in the car. At the checkpoint, we were made to wait. They wouldn’t allow us to switch so I could drive, although she was clearly in severe pain.’

After the delay, the Israeli military who guard the checkpoint forced Nadia to drive herself to hospital.



According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 10 per cent of pregnant Palestinian women were forced to endure labour or childbirth at a checkpoint between 2000 and 2007, resulting in the death of at least 35 babies and five women during the seven-year period. This data is at the centre of a new research abstract published this week in the leading medical journal, The Lancet.

The abstract’s author, Halla Shoaibi, is a lawyer at the University of Michigan. She believes there may be grounds for Israel to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity for obstructing pregnant Palestinian women as they try to reach medical care during labour.



Israel has over 500 checkpoints and barriers across occupied Palestine; a journey that should take minutes can take hours. Approximately 18,000 pregnant Palestinian women each year will develop complications.


Sexual and reproductive health consultant Carol Bradford says that checkpoint delays complicate an already fragile situation:

‘The Thaddeus and Maine “Three Delays Model” identifies the main causes of needless death of a mother and, often, her newborn. The first delay is getting out of the home when a woman needs emergency care; the second is in getting to the facility; and the third is when the facility can’t help her because it doesn’t have the right equipment or supplies. All three are at play in the occupied Palestinian territory.’

The Fourth Geneva Convention states that ‘expectant mothers shall be the object of particular protection and respect’. Yet, in 2009, the Committee Against Torture said it was ‘seriously concerned’ by the ‘undue delays and denial of entry’ at Israeli checkpoints of those seeking urgent medical care. Shoaibi’s analysis will investigate a claim against Israel based on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Article 7 (1) (k), which prohibits ‘inhumane acts…intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health’.



Individual testimonies lodged with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights certainly indicate inhumane treatment, great suffering and the loss of life as a result of checkpoint delays. A testimony given in August 2003 reported the birth, and death, of a baby girl at a checkpoint in northern West Bank. The mother was prevented from reaching an ambulance on the other side. The baby died after the father was forced to cut his baby’s umbilical cord with a stone.



Yet, despite the gravity of individual cases, Shoaibi will need to show that Israel’s actions are intentional, widespread and systematic. The statistic of one in 10 [women giving birth at checkpoints] would suggest a widespread problem. But it’s very likely that even this number is a huge underestimation, because many cases from isolated rural areas never get reported.



Proving Israel’s strategic intent to cause suffering will be a challenge. However, there have been indications of an attitude of aggression amongst the Israeli military towards childbearing Palestinian women. In March 2009, there was international outrage over a set of t-shirts commissioned by Israeli soldiers depicting a pregnant Palestinian with a target over her belly. Over the image were the words One shot – two kills.

Whether or not Shoaibi is able to validate a claim to the International Criminal Court, the fact that a significant number of pregnant women have routinely been denied safe passage to a hospital must raise alarm bells. The international rule of occupation requires Israel to enable the people of occupied Palestine to live as ‘normal’ a life as possible.



‘Is it normal that our women are giving birth at checkpoints?’ asks Farid. ‘If you think it’s normal I have nothing more to say.’

‘The mountain that eats men alive’

Cerro Rico is famed for the harsh conditions faced by its miners. But, as James Dryburgh discovers, it is not only men who are ‘rock-breakers’ in Bolivia’s Potosí region. Women too, some as old as 81, work in the shadow of the sacred mountain.

Potosí, once one of the largest and richest cities in the world, has an incredible history. It is estimated that as many as eight million Andean Indians died because of the mining of its Cerro Rico (Rich Hill). The workers were brought from all over the region – in today’s Bolivia and Peru – to serve the Spanish Crown. Even now, two miners die each week of silicosis in Potosí, in addition to deaths from other mining-related illnesses and accidents. The ‘mountain that eats men alive’ has been written of many times, though perhaps not often enough read. While the vast majority of miners are men, it is not only men who live in the shadow of Cerro Rico.

The good mother

The mountain itself is female. In indigenous Andean culture mountains represent Pachamama (Mother Earth). The Spanish conquerors understood her importance and she became synonymous with the Virgin Mary, helping to convert the indigenous to Catholicism. This association is particularly evident in Potosí’s most famous painting, the 18th century La Virgen del Cerro, by an unknown artist, in which the Virgin Mary is the mountain of Cerro Rico.

Since Pachamama is a ‘good mother’, people toast to her honour almost every day by spilling a small amount of the fermented corn drink chicha to the earth, before drinking the rest. The toast is called ch’alla, from the word for offering, in the native language of Quechua.

Celestina, Macaria and Maria are palliris, a name given to female rock-breakers, which comes from the Aymara language, meaning ‘to select’. For around four dollars a day, the women sort through discarded mine tailings on the surface of the mountain, breaking the rocks with a small hammer to separate tin, silver and zinc. Their decades of experience allow them to determine each mineral by sight and by weighing the rocks with their hands.


Celestina is 81 years old, and has been a palliri for around 40 years. Maria, Celestina’s 62-year-old daughter, has been working with her mother for 18 years. Though Maria enjoys working with her mother, she laments that Potosí has given Bolivia, and indeed the world, so much, but never gets anything back. Maria has a point.

Working in the mines

Their hands look strong and wise, coated in the fine, light blue-grey dust of the minerals they sort. Celestina has a heavily lined face shadowed by her wide-brimmed black hat and wears dangly metal earrings. They all wear hats and cover their skin with thick, long skirts and llama wool cardigans. Celestina’s eyes almost look permanently closed from decades of squinting at the harsh high-altitude sun reflecting off the light coloured rock.

As we start talking, the face of 68-year-old Macaria lights up. She is immensely proud of her community and begins telling me her story before I even ask a question. She is a palliri because neither her husband, who was left brain-damaged after a mining accident, nor her daughter, who doesn’t have any legs, can work.

Macaria began working in the mines before the age of 15, when her father died. At first, the mine boss said she was too young, but she had a Spanish godfather who pulled some strings and soon she was working alongside her brothers. She worked until she was 23 in lead and silver mines, later working outside separating minerals with water and gravity.

When the US flooded the market in 1985, the price of tin crashed, making life even tougher on the mountain. Female workers got together and organized a support and response group called Centre of Palliris. They started street cleaning and tree planting groups to deal with unemployment. Macaria was president of the organization for several years and tells me she’s a very political person and is proud that, with little opportunity, she still enjoys life and is informed. Today, the group is called the Association of Female Workers of Cerro Rico, Potosí.

The important things in life
We sit, green bags on our laps, de-veining then chewing the coca leaves they contain to suppress the effects of altitude, fatigue and hunger as we look over the formerly government-owned miners’ houses that are now mostly empty. The women all reflect that conditions were much better before the crash and subsequent re-privatisation of mining in Bolivia. I ask Macaria what the three most important things in life are. She explains that work is the most important, because without it you cannot have health or look after your family.

Today Cerro Rico is hollow, but still standing at 4,860 metres above sea level. She has not once slept during the past 460 years, since the Spanish learnt of her riches. She still gives. She still takes away. She is tired, but not exhausted. Each day approximately 3,000 tonnes of mineral are brought out of Cerro Rico by around 15,000 miners, working in over 500 separate mines.

Macaria explains that work is the most important, because without it you cannot have health or look after your family
Potosí is one of Bolivia’s most indigenous regions. Over a third of its population only speak native languages. Almost every mining family is indigenous with Quechua, or sometimes Aymara, as their first language.

In 1581, Phillip II of Spain told an audience that a third of Latin America’s Indians had already been wiped out, and, referring to Potosí specifically, that mothers killed their own children to save them from the horrors of the mines. It is estimated there were 70 million Indians in Latin America when Columbus sailed towards its shores thinking he had found a back door to Asia. A century and a half later, there were just 3.5 million. Modesta only speaks Quechua and lives in a tiny adobe (mud brick) building on the side of the mountain. Two thirds of the building houses mining equipment and the other third is home to Modesta, her husband, and five of their seven children. She earns US$45 a month for protecting a mine entrance and mining equipment from thieves, all day, every day. She has six scrawny dogs to help.

What hope?

Modesta is spinning llama wool to make clothing and bedding for her family while she tells me of her 14 years living amongst the mines. Originally Modesta’s family were peasant farmers in the region of Santa Cruz, but if the rains were unkind to their crops they had no food. They moved to Potosí and her husband took a job in the mines. He is now a second-class miner earning between $30 and $70 a week, depending on production and the quality of minerals extracted. Modesta tells me that almost half his last pay went on his weekly alcohol binge. Drinking is a huge problem within the mining community. Alcohol not only exacerbates poverty, it brings violence and unplanned children into the home.

Modesta doesn’t want her children to work in the mines because of the danger, poor pay and short life, but she confesses, ‘

I have no hope for our situation’

.

Her eldest child has a job in a brick factory in Argentina and her 14-year-old son, Saturino, wants to follow his older brother after one more year of school. Modesta believes the only opportunity for her 12-year-old daughter Sylvia is to become a maid for a wealthy family, and if she is lucky, in a richer region of Bolivia.

Elias is seven and the only child with a local interest. Modesta helps him to collect coloured rocks and minerals, which he sells to tourists. Sadly, many of the children of Cerro Rico do likewise, which causes rivalry between the child sellers, leading to bullying, violence and an absence of friendships. Fortunately, Modesta’s children have some friends nearby, who aren’t competitors for tourists’ short change.

Despite centuries of tragedy on this mountain, there is a joy, dignity and beauty within her people. Though she provides the livelihood for thousands of people, and there is a subtle fear about the day Cerro Rico is finally exhausted, she is sacred to the people of Potosí

Modesta shines with a huge, almost toothless smile as she talks about Jose, her youngest, who is only four. Too young for school, he spends the days with his mother and clings to her as we talk. Given the average life span of miners in Potosí is around 38 years, the odds are that his father will be dead before Jose is 10. He and his brothers will likely be forced to follow their father’s fading footsteps, down the hill, into the mine, and into an early grave.

Miners generally don’t have access to running water, let alone hot showers, and are permanently coated in fine dust, meaning intimacy often results in sickness, especially in women. The wives face a future that is likely to bring the early loss of their husband and the primary family income, creating the need for children to begin working at disturbingly young ages. These mothers and wives have to deal with anxiety and fear for their children and husbands below in the mines every single day.

Keeper of a million stories

The women of Cerro Rico are widows or widows in waiting and are eventually left with the responsibility of trying to ensure their husbands can at least rest in peace. The miners are proud men who can truly say they have sacrificed their life for their family. But for the poorest miners of Potosí, even death is a struggle. If a miner is not in a co-operative, his family has to pay for a burial plot on a five yearly basis. If they cannot afford the payments, the remains are discarded and the plot used for someone else. Despite centuries of tragedy on this mountain, there is a joy, dignity and beauty within her people. Though she provides the livelihood for thousands of people, and there is a subtle fear about the day Cerro Rico is finally exhausted, she is sacred to the people of Potosí. Huge protests towards the end of 2010, in which Potosinos went on strike and blockaded the entire region for 20 days, ensured an agreement with the national government to preserve the form of Cerro Rico, even if it means leaving some of her wealth where it is.

A few days later, looking up from the city to the conical red mountain, I say to Jacqueline, a local woman, ‘that mountain must be the keeper of millions of stories.’ ‘She never stops speaking,’ Jacqueline replies.

James Dryburgh is a Scottish-born Tasmanian writer passionate about truth and helping the world’s muffled voices to be heard. He has lived in Scotland, Spain and Latin America and is Associate Editor of tasmaniantimes.com.

Xenophobic attacks on the rise in crisis-hit Greece

Things are going from bad to worse for Athens’s immigrants, who are being targeted by resurgent fascist groups. Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi reports from Greece.


Life is tough for the quarter of a million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers living in destitution across Athens. They are packed, sometimes 10 or 20 people to a room, into dark, dingy flats. The unlucky ones bed down in the city’s parks and squares.

Their lives won’t get better anytime soon. Greece has a backlog of around 60,000 asylum cases, mainly from Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Iran and Iraq; they could take years to clear.

Some have already waited for up to a decade for a decision. Even if their cases are looked at, it is unlikely they will be allowed to remain. Greece grants refugee status to less than one per cent of applicants, the lowest rate in the European Union where the average is around 36 per cent.

'Sacrifice your life'
In a sign of growing desperation, in December last year, 100 Afghan asylum seekers, some of whom had waited for up to eight years for an asylum decision, set up a protest camp outside Athens University. Twelve of the group, including one young mother, sewed their lips together and went on a hunger strike.

‘The best way to get a response from the Greek government is to really sacrifice your life,’ says 22-year-old Ezmerey Ahmadi, one of the protesters. ‘Most important is getting our papers; we aren’t requesting any economic help.’ The hunger strike ended in February, but the protest continues. Six of the protesters have been granted asylum, six have been refused and the rest remain.

The current economic climate makes life particularly tough for asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Greece. Financial woes have sparked a rise in support for the political far-right. And as the socialist government implements an unprecedented package of austerity measures, many ordinary Greeks are turning to fascist groups, quick to blame migrants for the country’s problems.

Last October the far-right party Chrysi Avgi, also known as Golden Dawn, won its first seat in Athens city council. Since then it has held several anti-immigrant rallies in areas with large migrant communities. Fascist activists are also alleged to have carried out random revenge attacks on innocent migrants after a Greek man was stabbed to death in central Athens in March.

‘I never come out of the house during the night, because I’m afraid of the fascists,’ says Abolzar Jalily. ‘I came from Afghanistan to be safe.’ Jalily left his home after receiving death threats because he worked as an interpreter for foreign forces. Now he faces a fresh threat from a violent fascist movement operating with near impunity in downtown Athens, where Jalily lives with his family.

‘In one attack the fascists killed some refugees and injured more than 150 people. They beat them very badly and they could not go to the police because they would do nothing for them,’ he says.

Tania, a Bulgarian immigrant who has lived in Greece for 10 years, says she is too afraid to travel downtown after hearing stories about Albanians being randomly attacked. ‘There are some fascist organizations that are trying to blame foreigners for many things that happen here, one is taking their [Greeks’] jobs.’

Conditions for migrants in Greece are likely to deteriorate further. The new austerity measures will mean greater penury for those who are already last in line for state support and living wage jobs.

‘I am a single mum and I have no help from the government,’ explains Tania, who is a maths and physics graduate, but works as a cleaner and nail technician. If you are a foreigner here, you have no social services to help you.’

Let the problem escalate
‘When Greek society is being destroyed, it is easy to understand that there will be people that treat migrants and asylum seekers as scapegoats,’ says Spyros Rizakos, who works for Aitma, an NGO in Athens. ‘This is the result of the lack of policy on these issues. The Greek government doesn’t address the problems of migrants and refugees, they let them escalate and it becomes difficult to control.’

But the difficulties bought on by the country’s economic problems are only a small part of the wider problems faced by migrants in Greece.

The country is notorious for its appalling border reception centres, where immigrants can be held for up to six months in overcrowded and dirty cells. Nearly 90 per cent of undocumented migrants enter Europe through Greece, creating tension on the country’s border with Turkey, where 45 people died trying to cross last year.

Georgios Salamagkas heads up the police directory of Orestiada, a city in Northern Greece close to the Turkish border. His officers have felt the pressure as the number of immigrants entering this tiny area exploded from 3,500 to 36,000 in the last year.

‘They risk drowning in the river to cross the border to reach a better life,’ Salamagkas says. ‘You feel sad about the drowned people but you also feel anger for the traffickers who do not take the measures to keep human life safe. If they put them in life jackets they would be safe, it costs just €3.’

While Greece’s immediate focus is on clearing its debts, what is clear is that money alone will not solve the country’s immigration problems.

Lukashenka’s endgame

Posted by Gleb Kanunnikau |


As his country goes into economic freefall, Belarus’s president plans to trade prisoners – including journalist Andrzej Poczobut – for cash.



It is often suggested that the European Union’s foreign policy toward Russia and Belarus is a joke – there are too many people involved and too many conflicting interests to conduct any kind of consistent policy. And after all, the EU’s main objective in the region is ensuring a steady supply of Russian oil and gas.


However, some people in Belarus, the ‘last dictatorship in Europe’, are paying close attention to what the European parliament says and does. For example, a routine discussion about the situation in Belarus in April, with MEPs participating via video conference link, may sound harmless to most people, but it was deemed a subversive and dangerous act by the Belarusian authorities.





When Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza (a leading Polish newspaper) and a Belarusian citizen, decided to attend said conference with MEPs in Minsk, Belarus, he was arrested on the way there and charged with defaming the president.


Two months later, he is still in prison, awaiting trial on 14 June, when the judge will likely pronounce him guilty. He is charged with insulting the president (Article 368 allows up to two years in prison for this ‘crime’), and offending the president (Article 367 – up to four years for that). His articles in Gazeta Wyborcza and even his blog posts on Livejournal.com are supposedly evidence of his misconduct.


Andrzej Poczobut is a brave and decent man, who has covered the Belarusian situation for Gazeta Wyborcza for a number of years, providing a crucial insight into the closed society that exists just east of the Polish border. He is also an activist in a local organization for Polish people, which is being persecuted by the Belarusian government, which labels them extremists and separatists. As someone who knows Andrzej and other native Poles living in the region, I must say that this is a blatant lie and an attempt to find internal enemies by our authoritarian government.


What has happened is something of an anomaly: normally, people find a way to avoid lengthy jail sentences for such offences. There’s always a way to escape abroad just prior to arrest. Most people heed the warning when the KGB confiscates their laptop and searches their home the first time. Or they decide that it probably is not worth it right after KGB agents in civil clothes rough them up once or twice. Most people certainly don’t write a blog post after being beaten up by KGB, saying ‘I’m not afraid and I’m not leaving the country – don’t count on me running away’. This was the last straw – the KGB doesn’t like being provoked.


It is easy to dismiss the story as yet another sad, but all-too-familiar episode – after all, Belarusian journalists have been jailed, harassed and even abducted before. This is just an unfortunate sidenote in the rapidly unfolding story of the demise of Belarus’s authoritarian state. But before you do dismiss it, consider that this is an atrocity even by Belarusian standards.


Never before in the history of Belarus have journalists faced jail terms of up to four years in prison. The last time a comparable trial was held, in 2002, two brave journalists, Mikola Markevich and Paval Mazhejka, were convicted for defamation against the president and spent two years under ‘restricted freedom’ conditions in a minimum-security work camp. Nine years and two bitterly contested presidential elections have passed since then; elections during which hundreds of activists were tortured and imprisoned, but journalists have been spared the worst of the repression, or so it seemed.


What has changed? Why the cruelty and such seemingly short-sighted eagerness to arrest an international journalist, thus spoiling the government’s relationship with the West? The background is simple and very gruesome.


Last week, as President Lukashenka called the rapidly deteriorating economic situation in Belarus a national emergency, his government submitted a request for emergency monetary assistance to the IMF. This is a last resort to get cash – Russia having recently stopped subsidizing the Belarusian economy – but it is also a risky step.

International institutions have repeatedly condemned political repression, lack of economic reform and resistance to privatization as the main reasons against providing loans to Belarus in the past. Despite the EU and US’s cautious policy of isolating Belarus, it has still managed to borrow heavily abroad to support its security apparatus and inefficient socialist economy. Its national debt ballooned from 27.6 to 45.5 per cent in just four years.


The economy collapsed this spring, with prices going up 100 to 150 per cent over the course of two months, and imports of even basic goods such as baby food, coffee, rice and buckwheat drying up almost entirely.


This is the endgame for Lukashenka, who knows that his economic system won’t survive without massive aid from abroad, and who is trying to maintain internal stability with borrowed funds. His hope is that he will be able to win economic concessions and additional aid from the West by holding political prisoners hostage and avoiding larger internal reforms. When in 2007 dozens of political prisoners were released and criminal cases against them dropped, this was part of the EU’s plan for normalizing relationships with Belarus after the brutal and flawed presidential elections of 2006. Belarus was promised alleviating of political and economic sanctions and participation in international partnerships programmes.


If Belarusian authorities manage to get new loans, the agony of the Belarusian people will continue, but hopefully many people who are serving political sentences will be released. Here’s hoping that international pressure will help to overturn the decision in Andrzej’s case and he will be able to go home soon to his daughter and wife.




Andrzej’s newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza hosts a campaign to free Andrzej and provides some background about his case here: wyborcza.pl/poczobut/0,114034.html

Gleb Kanunnikau is a designer and trainer, who has worked on web projects in the media and education in former USSR and eastern Europe since 2006.

Define Feminism: a poem

found in the New Internationalist

Posted by Mari Marcel Thekaekara | My daughter and I, and my husband and sons, have had frequent conversations about feminism.


I realize I am a bundle of contradictions as I tell my annual batch of British development students to be ultra careful in India. To cover up for their own safety. I hate doing it because saying ‘wear long loose clothes’ goes against everything; it’s a step away from saying ‘wear a burqa or hijab’.


And I argue with a Muslim man that to say that women tempt men is ludicrous. If a man covets a five-year-old girl, is he the sinner or she? I ask him. So where’s the logic behind covering a girl child in black burqa from head to toe? He smiles, but his beautiful wife and daughter have recently moved into hijab, though their grandmothers in Kerala walked free and unencumbered. Am I a hypocrite?



What about culturally appropriate attire, ask my activist friends who don’t like scantily clad women walking around villages. There’s scope for a full-length article here. But for now I thought I’d share my daughter’s thoughts. She who insists she cannot write.



This then is from Tahira, born in 1983 with a different perspective from that of her mother who lived with sexually inappropriate remarks through the 1970s and 1980s, when few people talked about sexual harassment. And most women had to grin and bear it.



Us (Non)Feminist (Wo)Men



I’m not sure I’d call myself a feminist
Said my best friend (with a little moue of distaste), and my sister in law agreed.
They’re both
Intelligent, accomplished, and independent women.

Of course I’m a feminist
Said my beautiful, commonsensical mother
But please
Change into a kurta and out of those jeans before you leave.

It’s an elitist preoccupation
Said my activist scholar brother as he
Cleared the table
And started washing the dishes (while I propped up my feet)

Well, I guess I am a feminist!
Said my startled, future husband, and
Epiphany over,
He paid the bill and held the door for me.
……
Please don’t be chivalrous – it’s sexist!
Said the woman to my father,
Looking pointedly at
The door he held open, at a fancy Oxford conference.

My mostly loquacious father,
Who holds doors for absolutely everyone, (regardless of their genitalia,)
Said nothing, shrugged,
And preceded her in hurt bewildered silence.

Please don’t be so ethnocentric
I want to tell the woman from Oxford,
Don’t you realize
Chivalry’s a western cultural construct? (backpedal, quickly now, you don’t want to be racist).

Don’t sacrifice politeness for political correctness,
And start to second guess each thoughtful gesture.
That’s what I want to tell my father
He is clearly a feminist (according to me)
………
She’s exhausted, so she tells them, she’s impure and menstruating.
And is banished to the anteroom and the solitude she craves.
With an impish little smile,
She lies down on the matting, no one can touch her now for three whole days (Mission Accomplished!)

The audience chants Vagina! as I slip into the corridor,
To check His father’s eaten the dinner I cooked that morning.
Mindspace uncluttered,
I enjoy the rest of Eve Ensler’s brilliant, hilarious, feminist play

She swore she’d never be a passive victim (the girl I’d love if I were lesbian).
I want to shout applause and vehemently agree,
But I’ve shamed myself to silence,
As (earlier that day) we sat frozen as she confronted her molester alone (we were like strangers on a bus)
……
I want to tell my friend
That she can call herself a feminist, define it on her own terms
And continue
To wear a bra and want a boyfriend

I fundamentally believe
In equity and equality, so I’m definitely a feminist
But that isn’t
All that I am (the whole is greater than the parts)

I tell my morning mirror that I’m equanimously feminist,
Without boxing myself into black and white pigeon holes
That demarcate boundaries,
Imposed by other people’s misconceptions and insecurities.

More jobless than jobs

Thurrock tops Eastern league with more than 10 unemployed people chasing each job

5:01pm Monday 13th June 2011


THURROCK has the highest ratio of unemployed job seekers to vacancies in the Eastern region.

The borough has an average of 10.7 applicants per job, with 4,354 people claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance chasing 408 vacancies.

This is higher than the average in Southend, the neighbouring unitary authority, which has an average of 6.3 applicants per job.

Thurrock’s ratio is more than twice the average for Essex, which is 4.6.

The borough’s Tory MP, Jackie Doyle-Price, said the coalition is investing heavily in a work programme to ease unemployment.

She said: “People do not always work where they live.

“People who live in Thurrock often work in Kent, London and elsewhere in Essex so fewer vacancies in Thurrock does not mean fewer job opportunities for Thurrock people.

“The key issue though is to increase job opportunities and to make sure that work pays.

“The coalition Government is investing heavily in the work programme to make sure that those who can work are able to. Unemployed people will be given access to training programmes to equip them with skills and the benefits system is being reformed so that people are no longer trapped into being dependent on welfare.”

She added: “By tackling Government borrowing more money will be available to encourage the private sector to invest and that will lead to more jobs and I look forward to witnessing the creation of new jobs locally through for example the expansion at Lakeside and the continued investment at London Gateway.”

The unemployement figures were revealed at the GMB congress in Brighton on Friday.

The conference heard there are 5.8 unemployed workers chasing each unfilled job vacancy across the country as a whole, and 10.1 in London.

Interesting but sad news article

(c) Sky News 2011, 9:31, Tuesday 21 June 2011

Some 65 "repossession hotspots" have been identified by housing charity Shelter as unemployment levels rise and more homeowners find themselves in negative equity.

Corby in the East Midlands was found to have the highest rate of at-risk homeowners with some 7.56 per 1,000 - nine times higher than the lowest rate in West Dorset of 0.83.

The Northamptonshire town has the highest proportion of homeowners who have been issued with a possession order for their home over the last 12 months, according to the research.

It is closely followed by Barking and Dagenham and Newham in London; Knowsley, Merseyside and Thurrock, Essex.

A possession order is an advanced stage of the repossession process which means a homeowner is at serious risk of losing their home.

The study by the housing and homelessness charity identified 65 of 324 local authorities as repossession hotspots.

Shelter warns that the figures reflect a need for homeowners across the country to prepare for higher mortgage repayments when interest rates rise as expected later this year.

A recent report by the Financial Services Authority said banks are masking the true scale of the threat, with experts predicting repossessions will hit 45,000 next year.

The findings of the charity's report correspond with these areas having higher and increasing rates of unemployment.

The average rate of unemployment in the local authorities with the highest rates stood at 9.6%, compared to 5.3% in those with the least.

And unemployment has risen, on average, by 3.3% over the last three years in the most at risk areas, compared to a 1.4% increase in the lowest, Shelter said.

The study also identified clusters of local authorities - Tyneside, Kent coastal towns (Thurrock, Medway, Swale) and The Wash (South Holland, Fenland, Peterborough) - among those in the highest risk group.

It also highlighted a red "ribbon" of repossessions across northern England from the Mersey in the west to the Humber estuary in the east.

The results are based on analysis of the latest Ministry of Justice figures on the rates of claims leading to possession orders per 1,000 households for each local authority, published in May 2011.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, said: "This research paints a frightening picture of repossession hotspots across the country where homeowners are literally on the brink of losing the roof over their head.

"We know only too well that the combined pressures of high inflation, increased living costs and stagnant wages are really taking a toll on people.

"All it takes is one thing like job loss to tip people over the edge and into the spiral of debt and repossession and ultimately homelessness."