Links I liked
To lure you away from your Monday morning tasks, we’ll start this roundup of last week’s top @fp2p tweets with some good news
Get a life: a new paper shows that the harder you work, the fatter you get. To which Claire Melamed replied, ‘so if we get lazier we get thinner? win-win!’ (caution, file
under ‘causation v correlation’)
A hundred Colombian farmers are taking on BP in the UK high court in one of the largest cases in environmental legal history.
And a must read for campaigners: Gandhi’s salt march, building momentum & instrumental v symbolic victories in protest movements
Otherwise, my twitter feed was dominated by two issues – Ebola and Inequality
Ebola
Oxfam launched an emergency appeal and said only the military could move at the speed and scale required to stop the disease from escalating to catastrophic levels.
What would fair shares for Ebola funding look like? How does that compare with actual pledges to date? Here’s some calculations by ODI’s Marcus Manuel. Are you listening, Europe?
According to the FT, in the US, the wife of the first victim was left for five days with contaminated material. Meanwhile in Nigeria (now declared Ebola free) they disinfected houses immediately. Anyone else reminded of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans v Havana?
Probably too soon to be talking about this but the New York Times thinks the disease may come to be seen as a critical juncture both for Jim Kim’s leadership at the World Bank, and sorting out West Africa’s health systems.
Inequality
It was a bumper week for inequality – the theme of Blog Action Day on Thursday and Ricardo Fuentes and the Oxfam research team launched Mind the Gap, a new blog on inequality (and anything else that moves them)
The UK is the only G7 country with rising inequality since 2000. Globally, the richest 1% now has 50% of the world’s total wealth ($263tn)
The Guardian had a good editorial on inequality, the World Bank and IMF and what a genuine end to the Washington Consensus would require
And a brilliant 3 minute videographic on East African inequality. Can we have one for every other region and country please? [h/t Rakesh Rajani]
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