famine

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• 3/12/2023
  

  Irish Legend Should Inspire the Fight Against Famine Today

  by William Lambers

  The Irish show Riverdance has incorporated elements of legend derived from the Irish experience of famine, and raised funds to help victims of hunger around the world, an example to follow at St. Patrick's Day. 

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• SOURCE: Hollywood Progressive
  3/1/2023
  

  "Mr. Jones" Shows Fake News Has Always Been a Weapon Against Ukraine

  by Walter G. Moss

  The new Amazon feature "Mr. Jones" details the famine imposed on Ukraine by Stalin's policies in the 1930s, and the battle among journalists to control the story. It's a timely reminder of the connection of information and power. 

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• SOURCE: NPR
  11/28/2022
  

  The Anniversary of Ukrainian Famine Shows the Past isn't Past

  A famine 90 years ago killed four million Ukrainians—and possibly more, deaths survivors blamed on Soviet Russia. The commemoration is a rallying point of resistance to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

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• SOURCE: Irish Times
  11/30/2020
  

  ‘Bodies Left for Weeks. People Eaten by Dogs’: A New Documentary on the Irish Famine

  “The British abandoned people to starvation,” says Prof Kevin Whelan of the University of Notre Dame. “At the highest level of government there was a sense that this ultimately wasn’t their problem”. A new Irish television documentary is narrated by Liam Neeson.

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• SOURCE: The Times (London)
  7/23/2020
  

  Historians blast BBC for ‘unbalanced’ News At Ten report on Churchill

  Historians have criticised a BBC News report on Tuesday about Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine, which killed three million people in 1943 and 1944. The report arguably blamed Churchill's racism without considering other material factors that lead to 3 million deaths. 

• 
• 6/7/2020
  

  Mourning in America

  by Ed Simon

  Historically the powerful have described deaths from disease and starvation as "natural" to hide the political nature of suffering and their own responsibility. To mourn is to fight this erasure.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/5/2020
  

  Irish Return an Old Favor, Helping Native Americans Battling the Virus

  More than 170 years ago, the Choctaw Nation sent $170 to starving Irish families during the potato famine. Now hundreds of Irish people are repaying that old kindness.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  10-24-18
  

  85 Years Later, Ukraine Marks Famine That Killed Millions

  Ukrainians lit candles on their tables or windowsills to commemorate the famine, called the Holodomor, which means death by hunger in Ukrainian.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  1-31-18
  

  The Famine Ended 70 Years Ago, but Dutch Genes Still Bear Scars

  Babies born during the Dutch Hunger Winter became adults with higher rates of health problems. Now researchers may have found the genetic switches that made it happen.

• SOURCE: Special to HNN
  3-29-13
  

  William Lambers: Remember the Hungry This Easter

  William Lambers partnered with the UN World Food Programme on the book Ending World Hunger. He is a member of the Feeding America Blogger Council.A survey by the National Retail Federation says Americans will spend about 17.2 billion dollars on Easter this year.Imagine if that spending could be changed, just even a little bit. If one billion of that amount went to global hunger relief it could fund humanitarian emergencies in war devastated Syria, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Mali and other countries.At the time of Easter 1946 Americans cut back on festivities in order to help those suffering in countries leveled by World War II. While the hard fought war had been won, the peace had not. Hunger was enemy that remained. The U.S. Army in Austria, for instance, was helping provide school meals to hungry children.Americans listened to the plea of President Harry Truman around Easter when he warned, "we cannot ignore the cry of hungry children. Surely we will not turn our backs on the millions of human beings begging for just a crust of bread. The warm heart of America will respond to the greatest threat of mass starvation in the history of mankind."

• SOURCE: WaPo
  2-5-13
  

  Max Fisher: The Cannibals of North Korea

  Max Fisher is the Post's foreign affairs blogger.There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn’t unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.“Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.The panic, Demick concludes, may have exceeded the actual threat. “It does not seem,” she writes, “that the practice was widespread.” But it does appear to have happened....