Top 1% 'own half global wealth' - Credit Suisse report


16 October 2014 Last updated at 13:07 BST


The richest 1% of people own nearly half the world's wealth, according to a report out this week.
With total global wealth more than doubling this century, total household wealth in China is now the third highest in the world, only surpassed by the US and Japan, says the report by banking giant Credit Suisse.

BBC News investigates its findings - in 60 seconds.
Video produced by Michael Hirst

Abdurrahman said Islamic State members were being trained by Iraqi officers who had joined the group and who were once pilots under former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

It’s unclear how many Iraqi pilots have defected.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/17/ex-iraqi-pilots-training-isis-fighters-to-fly-captured-planes-in-syria-rights/

KARACHI: A recent research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that only 12% of drone victims in Pakistan have been identified as militants.

Moreover, the research also stated that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified as members of al Qaeda.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/776962/only-12-of-drone-victims-in-pakistan-identified-as-militants-report/

The West Texas teabola outbreak has spread and is now threatening Austin.

Symptoms, including explosive diarrhea of the mouth, have been seen in individuals from ex-con and rat catcher Tom Delay, to Gov Rick Perry's office. Perry's staff has denied he has the disease and Perry himself can't remember. Perry said, "Obviously Obama has infected Texasistan with teabola in order to make us look stupid. I have a three agenies of government I would do away with to deal with this threat - the education, the uh, the health and let’s see. I can’t the third one. I can’t. Sorry Oops.”"

Hazmats suits will be issued to all Austin residents, including earplugs.

Large brand-name drug firms want to use the TPP to impose rules throughout Asia that will raise prices on medicine purchases for consumers and governments, and be in effect for the next several decades. With billions at stake, Big Pharma wants the TPP to be a road map for rules that will govern Pacific Rim economies for the next several decades.

A U.S. proposal in the text – to provide long automatic monopolies for biotech drugs or biologics, which includes most new treatments for cancer – contradicts the policies included in recent White House budgets and if adopted would undermine key cost savings touted by the administration. The past budgets have included a specific pledge to shorten the same monopoly periods so as to reduce cost burdens on Medicare and Medicaid.

If the TPP is ratified with this U.S.-proposed provision included, Congress would be unable to reduce monopoly periods without risking significant penalties and investor-state arbitration.

CNN correspondent Arwa Damon, in an interview with a young Syrian Kurd who was kidnapped by ISIS militants four months ago on his way back from school, was shocked when the boy seemed to sympathize with ISIS’s cause.

Merwan Mohammed Hussein told Damon he was “terrified” when ISIS first captured him and his fellow classmates. The militants took the children to a mosque to pray, and held them in a prison-like “primary school” where they would beat, electrocute, and even hang the hostages. They were “entrenched in ISIS’s version of Islam,” Damon said.

Hussein, who told Damon he feared he was going to be killed, said he came to the realization that ISIS doesn’t indiscriminately kill, but rather determines whether the person is an “infidel” beforehand.

The children were also forced to watch ISIS-produced videos of beheadings. Hussein said the videos weren’t meant to “instill fear,” but rather, he said, to tell the “truth” about ISIS, that they “don’t just grab a random person off the street and execute him without evidence — only if they are infidels.”

Asked what he thinks of ISIS, Hussein shocked Damon, his mother and his sister when he said “they are right.”

Photographs taken by activists in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani and examined by Israeli researchers appear to prove that Islamic State militants possess chemical weapons and may have used them.

Kurdish activists claim that Islamic State fighters used chemical agents in the village of Avdiko on July 12, according to a report in the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, which is published by the Global Research in International Affairs Center, a branch of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

Nisan Ahmed, the Kurdish authority health minister in Kobani, appointed a medical team to examine fighters' bodies, the report said. They found no bullet wounds, but rather "burns and white spots" on the dead fighters' bodies that indicated the use of chemical weapons

MERIA gained exclusive access to the photos and Israeli experts who have seen them believe they point to "the use of some form of chemical agent, probably mustard [gas]," the report said. However, the experts said, that is impossible to confirm without further investigation.

Non-participation is a vote for the corporate agenda for America

To those Americans, who don't plan to vote in a few weeks, please, please participate in your civics. Your country needs your engaged, self-interested participation. Right now the status quo don't need to take into consideration. To the extent that you don't oppose them and their corporate agenda, they can gain an even greater foothold in our democracy. Case in point, the last midterm election (2010): The folk who were animated and showed up to the polls were folks mobilized by all that newly available corporate agenda money via the January Citizen's United ruling. The lack of engagement and voting by democrats who apparently didn't think their majorities in the congress were worth protecting is the reason we now have the ridiculous obstruction we've been living under these last four years.

Here's a secret: Cold hard evidence that civic engagement helps the average guy get to a better quality of life. I would maintain that self-interested voting is a lynchpin in that equation as well. Even if you're engaged, you need to be engaged in voting for what you want and need for those things to be given priority.

A vote for the GOP is a vote for the corporate agenda for America

Both parties are clearly in bed with corporate america, so how can I say this? One party supports unions, raising the minimum wage, and wage equality for women the other doesn't. One party supports the right for women to family plan and the other doesn't. One party wants immigration reform and the other doesn't. One party refuses to raise taxes to pay down our 17 trillion in debt and blocks every attempt to do so. One party attempted to keep America from the joining the ranks of every other 1st world nation in having universal healthcare coverage for it's citizens, the other one enacted and defended that. Generally speaking, democrats own the safety net. They have defended it and strengthened it for 100 years. That having a safety net in America makes you hated by conservatives when it is literally the source of happiness and quality of life for people all over the free world is a mystery to me.

Each of these GOP positions hurts citizens but helps corporations. My reasoning is that putting dems in right now (how things were in 08) gets us back to sanity. It also sends the message that obstruction should be a losing not a winning strategy to the GOP. Their obstruction has cost this country 1 to 3 million jobs in our tepid recovery and it needs to be punished.

Am I blindly partisan? Is this yet another reddit "democratic circlejerk"?