A damning report claims that “staggering” global inequality means the combined wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the world is set to overtake the rest of the population in 2016.

Released just before the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the report by Oxfam warns that “Global wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated among a small wealthy elite”, while a billion people are forced to live on less than $1.25 a day.

Titled “Wealth: Having it all and wanting more”, the report claims that the wealthiest 1 per cent, a list of 80 people including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, saw their share of global wealth increase from 44 per cent in 2009 to 48 per cent in 2013. If this trend continues at the current rate, it will exceed 50 per cent next year.

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, said in a statement released ahead of the conference: “Do we really want to live in a world where the one per cent own more than the rest of us combined? The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

Byanyima criticised world leaders for promising to tackle extreme inequality, but failing to “walk the walk”.

“It is time our leaders took on the powerful vested interests that stand in the way of a fairer and more prosperous world,” she said.

“Business as usual for the elite isn’t a cost free option – failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades. The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality – they get a smaller share of the economic pie and because extreme inequality hurts growth, there is less pie to be shared around.”

Byanyima will co-chair the forum in Davos, and has pledged to use Oxfam’s high-profile to further its agenda. It is calling on governments to reduce tax dodging, invest in health and education and promote gender-equality through economic policies, among other goals.

Source: Christian Today

Adeba Shaker, a 14-year-old from Iraq’s minority Yazidi sect, recalled the day when she smiled again for the first time since her abduction by Islamic State militants.

It was October 28, 2014, when she was reunited with her younger sister who had also been kidnapped and sold in a market.

Shaker and 13-year-old Chenar found each other at a camp for internally displaced people just outside Dohuk, in northern Iraq, where Chenar came after being freed by a Sunni Muslim family who paid to save her from Islamist fighters.

“I can’t describe how I felt, I was so happy,” Shaker told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the camp. “Now we need to find everybody else.”

Sixteen of Shaker’s relatives are still being held by Islamic State fighters who control large swathes of Iraq and Syria. They were abducted from their village in the Yazidi heartland of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, and separated.

Islamic State has hounded ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq since seizing the city of Mosul in June, killing and displacing thousands of Christians, Shi’ite Shabaks and Turkmen who lived for centuries in one of the most diverse parts of the Middle East.

Hundreds of Yazidi women and girls have been captured, raped and tortured, and forced to convert to Islam and marry Islamic State followers, according to rights groups.

Shaker was trafficked to the Syrian border and was given as a “gift” to fighters on the frontline. She was converted to Islam and forcibly married to one of them.

Young Chenar was sold at the local market. Just hours before the bidding started, a Sunni man noticed her. “He said I was too young,” Chenar said.

He paid $1,500 for her and brought her to his home. “As soon as I stepped in the house, he allowed me to call my family.”

Although she was told she would be released, the man told her to be patient.

“The Daesh (an Arabic acronym used for the Islamist group) were watching all our moves, it was a very dangerous situation for everybody,” she said.

Chenar was held in the man’s house for 55 days.

“I wasn’t asked to do anything in the house. I would just eat and sleep. They were kind to me, although I was not permitted to go out.”

The sisters told their story while sitting in their tent in the Shariya refugee camp that opened in mid-November. They live with two brothers, two cousins and an uncle.

“We know other members of our family are still alive, some of them called us, but they have not been able to escape,” said Sal, one of the brothers.

The Yazidi are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. Tens of thousands have fled Islamic State fighters, who say the Yazidi must embrace their radical version of Islam or die.

Shaker escaped from a house in Raabia, Iraq, in late August when her Islamic State captors received a phone call and stormed out. She took the chance to escape, running towards the Syrian border and to safety with Kurdish fighters.

She is now focused on finding her mother and sisters and leaving Iraq for good.

“Nowhere is safe here for us. I want to go away. I want to go to America.”

In the meantime, the family faces harsh, wintry conditions in the camp, where water seeps into tents when it rains. And fear remains.

Some of the nearly 3,000 families sheltering at Shariya are Sunni, the branch of Islam followed by Islamic State, and Shaker, like many others, fear further violence.

“They are scared to be harmed again and, as a result, there is constant tension,” said Stefano Nanni, who works at the camp for Italian aid group Un Ponte Per.

Nanni said the two groups were housed in separate sectors of the camp, but he thought they would have to be moved to different camps.

There are 21 camps in the Dohuk area – five still under construction – where 700,000 people live, most of them Yazidis.

Source: Christian Today

Pope Francis left the Philippines on Monday, ending a week-long trip to Asia that culminated with a rain-soaked Mass for about seven million people in the capital of Asia’s most populous Catholic nation, the largest-ever crowd for a papal event.

Vatican officials have said between six million and seven million people attended Sunday’s Mass in Manila’s Rizal Park and surrounding areas, eclipsing the roughly five million worshippers who flocked to a Mass by Pope John Paul in the same park 20 years ago.

The Pope’s plane took off from Manila at about 10 a.m. local time (0200 GMT) in clear blue skies, a stark contrast to the stormy weather since he arrived on Thursday.

Huge crowds greeted Francis at all his stops in the Philippines despite the bad weather. Thousands lined the streets along the papal route to the airport on Monday, some shouting “Viva Santo Papa!” and “Pope Francis, we love you!”

About a thousand schoolchildren danced and sang as he boarded the plane taking him back to Rome.

Several of Francis’s scheduled events in the Philippines were cut short by torrential rains and high winds, particularly on Saturday when he went to comfort survivors of Typhoon Haiyan that killed at least 6,300 people in the central Philippines in November 2013.

The Pope and the millions of faithful wore plastic ponchos during Sunday’s rain-soaked Mass.

As well as comforting typhoon survivors in the Philippines, Francis urged the government to tackle corruption and poverty, and pleaded for the world to hear the cries of poor, hungry, homeless and abused children.

Francis also took another swipe at the government’s population control efforts, saying the family was under threat from “insidious attacks and programs contrary to all that we hold true and sacred”.

Before the Philippines, the Pope spent two days in Sri Lanka, where he preached reconciliation between different religions after the predominantly Buddhist country’s 26-year civil war that ended in 2009 and killed up to 100,000 people.

Source: Christian Today