National / International News

A Zimbabwean politician has been attacked in the capital, Harare, during the last day of campaigning before a referendum on a new constitution.

North Korea has been increasingly hostile, warning of a preemptive nuclear strike on the U.S.

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The battle lines are drawn on the future of press regulation as Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband go head-to-head with David Cameron ahead of a crunch vote on Monday.

The Duke of Cambridge finds his ear playfully pulled by a friend as he enjoyed the horse racing at Cheltenham on Friday.

Surgeons in London have carried out the first 'warm liver' transplant using an organ which was 'kept alive' at body temperature in a machine.

When you think about poverty you might think about hunger and homelessness, but you also should think about the tough financial decisions that families in need have to cope with. A new HBO documentary, "American Winter" takes a look at the tough choices Americans face. The documentary follows the stories of eight families struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and reveals the impact of cuts to social services, the decline of the middle class, and the fracturing of the American Dream. The makers of that documentary, Joe and Harry Gantz wanted to make the documentary to provide an intimate snapshot of the state of the nation's economy as it is playing out in the lives of many American families.

 

"We saw that so many people were losing homes, losing jobs, working in jobs that didn't support a family even if they were working overtime. Then we saw that that was followed by cuts to social services across this country. With more need than at any time over the last 80 years, with all these cuts going on, we decided that we would do documentary that kind of looked at the human side of the equation. There's been films and books written about how Wall Street's affected, how banks were affected, so we wanted to look at how ordinary American families were affected across the country," says Joe.

How did the Gantz brothers find the families?

"We actually found all the families through monitoring calls at the 211 service in Portland, Ore. 211 is the number you call in most cities -- some cities it's 311 -- if you need some type of social services. We listened to hundreds of calls a day and asked some of them if they'd be willing to allow us to come out and film their attempt to get social services and get back on their feet," says Harry.

The families gave filmmakers intimate access into their lives.

"Once we worked with them, we worked by staying in the background. We don't tell them anything about what we would like them to do or not do. We just stay completely in the background and film their lives over three, four, five, six months. We were let into every aspect of their lives. There were some very difficult times going on for these families. We had to watch them decide whether they were going to pay their electricity bill or rent, whether they were going to move out of their apartment, whether they were going to lose their home altogether and have to go into a shelter," says Joe. "And then also families who didn't have enough to eat, needing to go to food banks to keep their families fed. That's difficult, very difficult, to be there so intimately in their life and watch this go on."

Joe says the stress of these families having to face tough choices -- like buying groceries or paying for rent -- day in and day out really affected him. Harry says many families in the documentary struggle with having to ask for help from the government or their own family members.

"You'll see many people discuss that in the film, where they felt they would never be in a position where they would ever ask the government for anything," says Harry. "Another gentleman is talking about asking his father to help him pay an electric bill and how that just pains him so much."

The documentary "American Winter" premieres on March 18, 2013 on HBO.

Malawi's Economic Planning Minister Goodall Gondwe resigns two days after being charged with treason, along with 11 other top officials.

At least 24 people were killed when a double-decker bus crashed in a mountain pass near Cape Town, rescue workers in South Africa say.

A US man dies of rabies, contracted from an infected kidney transplant, leading officials to treat three others who received organs from the same donor.

This week, the so-called Gang of Eight Democratic and Republican lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan plan for immigration reform. That news, plus a helpful assist from St. Patrick, got us thinking about immigrants and money.

It's difficult to be the newcomer in any setting. To adjust, you study your surroundings and learn ways to make yourself fit in and make others around you comfortable. So consider for a moment the immigrant experience and all the things newcomers to America must become aware of to survive in this country. But there are countless ways Americans can learn from immigrants as well. And it goes far beyond food and language. Different cultures carry customs from their homelands that, when observed and imitated, can help Americans strengthen their family life, their health and even their financial status.

What cultural wisdom found in immigrant communities can help improve our lives? For that, we turn to Claudia Kolker, author of "The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope" and a contributing editor at the Houston Chronicle.

"I think we're not considering [the benefits of immigration] as much as we could. Honestly, that in a lot of ways is human nature. I don't think we've ever considered it very much, but it is useful because there is so much evidence that on an entrepreneurial level, a business-formation level, a preventive health care level, that the immigrants who are here in this country already -- people we already here can track and know about -- have enriched us both metaphorically and literally. So it is a good time to look around us and see the ways that immigrants are succeeding in the things that we want," says Kolker.

Kolker says although the immigrant experience is typically viewed through an economic lens, their stories are not always ones of hardship. When Kolker looked at her immigrant friends, she realized that they had all sorts of achievements in terms of their children, families, savings, even their meal-time habits that she wanted. That's why she says this book is based, in part, on envy.

"In reporting [this book] I would ask foreign-born people, 'What's the smartest thing that people in your country do that we in the United States should emulate even as you hang onto them?' And the interesting thing is that everybody had a quick answer," says Kolker.

For example, in her book, Kolker discusses the Vietnamese money club, something similar to a rotating credit association or loan club. In the club, each person commits to giving a certain amount of money every month until 12 months have passed. Each month, one person walks home from the meeting with all that money and cash. But then that person has to keep paying back for the next 11 months until all of his or her friends in the group have gotten their pot of money. Kolker says it uses positive peer pressure and is very powerful. Even to forget your money one time, you'll destroy your credit with your best friends, she says.

This week, the so-called Gang of Eight Democratic and Republican lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan plan for immigration reform. That news, plus a helpful assist from St. Patrick, got us thinking about immigrants and money.

It's difficult to be the newcomer in any setting. To adjust, you study your surroundings and learn ways to make yourself fit in and make others around you comfortable. So consider for a moment the immigrant experience and all the things newcomers to America must become aware of to survive in this country. But there are countless ways Americans can learn from immigrants as well. And it goes far beyond food and language. Different cultures carry customs from their homelands that, when observed and imitated, can help Americans strengthen their family life, their health and even their financial status.

What cultural wisdom found in immigrant communities can help improve our lives? For that, we turn to Claudia Kolker, author of "The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope" and a contributing editor at the Houston Chronicle.

"I think we're not considering [the benefits of immigration] as much as we could. Honestly, that in a lot of ways is human nature. I don't think we've ever considered it very much, but it is useful because there is so much evidence that on an entrepreneurial level, a business-formation level, a preventive health care level, that the immigrants who are here in this country already -- people we already here can track and know about -- have enriched us both metaphorically and literally. So it is a good time to look around us and see the ways that immigrants are succeeding in the things that we want," says Kolker.

Kolker says although the immigrant experience is typically viewed through an economic lens, their stories are not always ones of hardship. When Kolker looked at her immigrant friends, she realized that they had all sorts of achievements in terms of their children, families, savings, even their meal-time habits that she wanted. That's why she says this book is based, in part, on envy.

"In reporting [this book] I would ask foreign-born people, 'What's the smartest thing that people in your country do that we in the United States should emulate even as you hang onto them?' And the interesting thing is that everybody had a quick answer," says Kolker.

For example, in her book, Kolker discusses the Vietnamese money club, something similar to a rotating credit association or loan club. In the club, each person commits to giving a certain amount of money every month until 12 months have passed. Each month, one person walks home from the meeting with all that money and cash. But then that person has to keep paying back for the next 11 months until all of his or her friends in the group have gotten their pot of money. Kolker says it uses positive peer pressure and is very powerful. Even to forget your money one time, you'll destroy your credit with your best friends, she says.

Silicon Valley may be the financial center of the tech industry, but lately San Francisco is earning a reputation as the heart and soul of it. Tech workers who don’t want to live in the Valley’s sprawling suburbs have migrated northward. And hundreds of tech-related businesses have set up shop in San Francisco too. But the culture of tech that's taking hold in in the city hasn't come without controversy.

If you’re a young professional employed by one of the big tech companies, contemporary San Francisco is a carnival of delights. On a given weekend, you might choose from the soft opening of a high-end neighborhood grocery store, a pricey music festival rollicking through landmark city parks, or a party for a podcasting startup at a tri-level downtown club. Thousands of tech workers live in vibrant neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District, and commute in corporate shuttles to their jobs in Silicon Valley.

Just a couple of miles away, there’s a neighborhood where all of this growth has been conspicuously absent -- the Tenderloin District. A quarter of Tenderloin residents live under the poverty line. Social service centers are clustered in this neighborhood, alongside drug activity, and immigrant families who can’t afford most other areas.

Walk a few blocks, and you hit a stretch of Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, that’s also been untouched by growth until recently. Nearly two years ago, Twitter leased a building here. To get Twitter to stay, and grow, in San Francisco, the city gave the company tax breaks on its stock options and payroll.

Twitter's press office didn't respond to requests for comment, but there are plenty of other people talking up the potential transformation the company could bring to this moribund stretch of Market Street.

SF Gentrification 2.0 -- For Better or Worse? from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.

"The youthful energy that comes with a project like this -- or any place where you’re going to put 7,000 employees on a city block that’s been essentially vacant for a decade -- will create an energy for the area that we haven’t seen here," said Tom McDonnell, V.P. of Leasing for Shorenstein. The development firm renovated this art deco building for Twitter, and other tech companies followed, renting space near “the cool kids.” Microsoft’s Yammer is here. So is the online retailer One King’s Lane. Forty-five-hundred residential units will soon go up near Twitter’s headquarters.

"That building jacked up the rents astronomically," said writer and Tenderloin resident Joseph Thomas. "All my merchant friends on Market Street, two or three of them are out of business." Thomas says the area is becoming unaffordable for middle and low income residents.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors president David Chiu says the explosion of the tech sector is directly responsible for a positive change: "Our budget deficit today is a quarter of what it was four years ago." Welcoming companies like Twitter here, says Chiu, brought in revenue that allows San Francisco to strengthen its social safety net -- access to homeless and mental health services, child care, at-risk youth programs.

Another ripple effect Chiu cites: job creation. The Bay Area Council Economic Institute found that for every new tech industry job, four non-tech jobs opened up.

Critics say those new jobs aren't necessarily good-enough jobs.

Sara Shortt heads the Housing Rights Committee, an advocacy group. "There will be lower paying jobs ...opportunities to service those tech workers. But those are exactly the kind of jobs that won't sustain families trying to afford rents in this market." Shortt says many of San Francisco's bus drivers or janitors have already been priced out of living in the city where they work -- and more will follow.

For many people born and raised in San Francisco, its new economy is at odds with the city's reputation for progressive social change.  For many people whom tech has delivered here, the city’s future is bright. The mid-Market area is only  the latest neighborhood where how much money you have may determine whether you get to stay.

Gerry McCann comments on the joint press reform proposal put forward by Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg on Friday ahead of Monday's vote.

An expert report on the regulation of the press in Scotland recommends statutory controls underpinned by law.

Researchers say the war will cost the U.S. $2.2 trillion, a figure that far exceeds the original government estimate of $50 to $60 billion. If you factor in borrowing costs, the U.S. will end up paying nearly $4 trillion for the invasion.

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A father accused of killing six of his children in a fire wanted to be a "hero and a victim", a court hears.

Astronomers in the 17th Century shared information to plot the path of comets. Now modern science uses the internet to follow this example.

The father of Guffran, then a 9-year-old Iraqi girl, was gunned down in a Baghdad street in 2006 at the height of the war. She continues writing letters to him, just as she did when he was alive. Now, she lives in one room with her mother and brother. She wants to study but faces difficult odds.

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A patient has received a donated human liver which was kept functioning at body temperature outside the body instead of the being stored in ice.

Prof Constantin Coussios shows Fergus Walsh how the new system works