Children labor for pennies mining mica in Madagascar [Video]

Mica is found in every car, plane and cell phone. But a year-long NBC News investigation reveals the shocking human cost of mining the mineral. Senior investigative correspondent Cynthia McFadden takes TODAY to the mica mines of Madagascar.

Children labor for pennies mining mica in Madagascar

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

House Panel to Examine Puerto Rico Crisis's Effect on Bond Market

The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations will hold a hearing next Thursday to examine the impact of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis on the bond market, the committee announced today. The hearing will deal  with issues that are within Financial Services’ jurisdiction on the Puerto Rico issue, “including the root causes of the crisis, the health of Puerto Rico’s financial services sector, and the impact of the crisis on investors,” a memo to committee members said.  Three witnesses are currently scheduled to testify at the hearing: Anne Krueger of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies; Juan Carlos Batlle of CPG Island Servicing, LLC; and William M. Isaac of FTI Consulting. Meanwhile, the full House Natural Resources Committee  will hear testimony Thursday from Antonio Weiss, a top Treasury Department official overseeing the administration’s response to the debt crisis. Natural Resources is the main House committee ...
Read more

Bankruptcy is wrong for Puerto Rico

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew recently visited Puerto Rico in an effort to show the administration’s support for the beleaguered territory. Lew’s comments on his trip to San Juan and his January 15 letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) make it clear that when it comes to Puerto Rico, the administration largely equates “support”  with “bankruptcy.”  The administration’s well-intentioned desire to help the people of Puerto Rico is laudable, but it is a mistake to give Puerto Rico the power to rewrite its laws and contracts through a retroactive application of new bankruptcy laws. The administration’s position is neither good policy for Puerto Rico nor the United States.  Ambac is one of the country’s largest guarantors of municipal and state debt.  In Puerto Rico, we insure well over $2 billion of the Commonwealth’s various debt obligations, and our commitments to the island extend until the year 2054.  Our financial support of the Commonwealth helped build i...
Read more

Mapping Extreme Poverty Around the World A new report from the

Image
A new report from the  World Bank  just landed, finding that a record low of 10% of humanity now live in extreme poverty, down from 11% in 2013. But poverty rates aren’t anywhere close to equal between continents or even countries, as our new series of maps clearly demonstrates. The World Bank provides an in-depth explanation for its methodology, which you can find in Appendix A of the full report  here . We focused on the percentage of people in each country living below what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty, or $1.90/day. We’ll let the researchers defend this definition on their own, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. It can be extraordinarily difficult to collect reliable data from so many countries on a regular basis, and in fact we used the latest year in which numbers were available whenever possible. For example, in some of these maps we compare 2011 figures against 2015. In short, our maps provide the clearest possible apples-to-apples compa...
Read more