Source: Alternet

Walking into the settlement at Kennedy Road in Durban, what one is confronted with is the familiarity of the place. I’ve been here before. Not to this settlement, but to others like it. To bastis in India and favelas in Brazil, to Mexico’s Neza-Chalco-Izta to Bangkok’s Klong Toey.

The United Nation’s agency that monitors housing – UN Habitat – has said that there are a billion people in informal settlements (slums). A demographer at the UN tells me that within a few decades, he assumes that the number might easily double. In fact, he says, given how bad the data is, two billion people might already live in these kinds of vulnerable settlements. ‘We just don’t have the numbers,’ he said. read more

Source: The Nation

ICAN’s visionary work has brought us that much closer to a nuclear-free world—and won them a Nobel Peace Prize in the process.

Oslo, Norway—From the indigenous communities exposed by remote nuclear tests, to activists living in bustling cities across the globe—a new resistance is growing. Peace Organizations worldwide have joined together to stand up to the nine nuclear-armed states in the form of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, known commonly as ICAN. While many have hailed them for revitalizing the nuclear-disarmament movement, their greatest achievement to date is their influence on the creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This bold new step in disarmament stands out from previous anti-nuclear movements, because it went after a comprehensive ban. While it won’t as of yet directly eliminate a single nuclear weapon, as none of the current signatories have them, many believe it will significantly alter the nuclear-weapons industry. read more