Vancouver restaurant opens its dining room to homeless

Ten Ten Tapas wants other restaurants to do the same, offer occasional free meals to those in need

The owner of Vancouver waterfront bistro Ten Ten Tapas is challenging other restaurateurs in the region to open their dining rooms to people in need.

On Wednesday, Derek Oelmann and staff at his False Creek restaurant seated and served 50 low income and homeless people who live in the neighbourhood...

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Restaurant+opens+dining+room+homeless/10716811/story.html

Nonprofit serves 1.5 million school lunches across India every day

The Akshaya Patra Foundation has quickly become one of the largest and most efficient nonprofits in the world, serving 330 million hot meals to schoolchildren in India each year.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Making-a-difference/Change-Agent/2013/1118/Nonprofit-serves-1.5-million-school-lunches-across-India-every-day

Hundreds gather to stop cancer patient being evicted from home

Blind Mother Sees Her Newborn for the First Time Using Special eSight Glasses

A woman who has been legally blind since birth was able to see her newborn for the first time using a pair of special glasses in a moment that was captured on video.

Kathy Beitz wanted badly to see her baby on the day she was born, and eSight Corporation, which creates special glasses priced at $15,000 that allows those who are legally blind to see to a certain extent, loaned her glasses for the day, according to a Huffington Post report.

Her older sister Yvonne Felix, who is also blind, uploaded the video. She said she had tried the glasses herself and was able to see her 6-year-old and 2-month-old children, but she was not able to see them when they were first born, and she wanted her sister to have that experience.

http://natmonitor.com/2015/01/24/watch-touching-video-of-blind-mother-seeing-her-newborn-for-the-first-time-video/

Bill and Melinda Gates Annual Letter

we think the next 15 years will see major breakthroughs for most people in poor countries.

They will be living longer and in better health. They will have unprecedented opportunities to get an education, eat nutritious food, and benefit from mobile banking.

These breakthroughs will be driven by innovation in technology — ranging from new vaccines and hardier crops to much cheaper smartphones and tablets — and by innovations that help deliver those things to more people.

The rich world will keep getting exciting new advances too, but the improvements in the lives of the poor will be far more fundamental — the basics of a healthy, productive life.

It's great that more people in rich countries will be able to watch movies on super hi-resolution screens. It's even better that more parents in poor countries will know their children aren't going to die...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&x-yt-ts=1421914688

www.gatesnotes.com/2015-annual-letter?WT.mc_id=01_21_2015_DO_GFO_domain_0_008

I was flying from Islamabad to Karachi last night and there was a girl onboard with a serious condition. First of all the stretcher took more seats than the patient had booked, but the other passengers managed it somehow. When we were on the way, the captain announced that the patient needs medical assistance and he requested all the doctors sitting in the plane to contact seat number 54 where the patient was lying. What a great feeling it was to see around 15 people raising from their seats and rushing towards the patient. They were all doctors and half of them were women. They gave immediate assistance to that patient. What a fabulous time it was to see all the doctors discussing and figuring out what to do. These people...they are Pakistan.


https://www.facebook.com/DaYoutubeGuy/photos/a.235509529807398.64535.212270682131283/852288238129521/?type=1&fref=nf

To me, it strikes against an overarching narrative. Bill Gates has said that, "By 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left in the world," and this is a misleading quote your report picks up on.
You're absolutely right; it does tie in to a critique of the overall narrative. The Davos summit is where the world's super-rich, governments, and business leaders get together and try and convince themselves that they're the good guys. The discourse around the fact that the poor are getting richer—and all the sort of things that they'd like to have us believe—is quite convenient because instead of casting them as undeserving beneficiaries of a system that allows 80 billionaires to earn the same amount of money as half the world's population, it casts them as philanthropic heroes. It means that Bill Gates holds the keys to defeating poverty, which is a huge distortion of reality.

And that's wrong?
There's some truth in what he says, in that the direction the world is going in is away from there being poorer or richer countries... But we have increasingly a situation where countries are rich but the people living in them are poor because of the huge inequality of wealth.

Though the rise from 288 million to 562 million living in poverty is pretty damning, Sub-Saharan Africa's population has grown, so could you argue that it was inevitable that the numbers of poor people there would rise?
Even in terms of proportion it's not great, because if you look at it that way it just means that we've pretty much stayed where we are after the last thirty years. Thirty years of aid, thirty years of hot air from philanthropists, aid agencies, about how much they're helping Africa has actually not really done anything to reduce the proportion of people who are living underneath that completely arbitrary poverty line. And if you look at raw numbers, things are a lot worse.

That's specifically about Africa. Globally, poverty has gone down hugely, but the reason that figure has gone down is mostly because of China, which is interesting because China's probably the one place in the world that has had least involvement from aid agencies and philanthropists in terms of reducing poverty, so if poverty has reduced across the world it's definitely not anything to do with the philanthropic capitalist model.

What would you say to someone who said that people in the West are better off than at almost any other point in history?
I think that's a slight exaggeration, but in terms of standard of living, people make this argument with technology quite a lot and yes, technology does get better, and medicine gets better, but in terms of economic wellbeing, some other things have got worse.

There's no Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type solution but part of the answer to some of these problems are quite simple. We have unfair trade rules across the world: make them fairer. Corporations are avoiding tax across the world: introduce rules to stop them doing that. Climate change is a big problem: introduce stronger environmental legislation and reduce emissions. Those are actually quite boring and difficult but nevertheless strong answers to the problems we've got in the world.

You can think of all sorts of complicated market methods to avoid these questions but you have to go back to the quite boring solutions of regulation and increasing oversight of some of the crazier parts of the market in order to make the world a better place. Ultimately, the solution is made up of these kinds of things, rather than the more exciting, technological ideas put forward at Davos.


http://www.vice.com/read/development-world-poverty-wealth-davos-myths-oscar-rickett-200