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Millions in Britain cannot afford to eat properly - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/12/food-j12.html

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Official figures published by the UK governments’ Family Food report show that millions of the poorest people are struggling to eat enough food to maintain their body weight and are facing malnourishment.

The Family Food report, published by the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), found that 6.4 million people consumed just 1,997 calories a day in the year 2013. It is advised that people should aim to eat at least 2,080 calories to maintain a healthy diet.

The report was based on an annual survey of 6,000 UK households. It found that the average number of calories consumed by the population as a whole was five percent higher than required. However, this was not the case for the poorest 10 percent of the population (6.4 million people), a damning statistic the report did not highlight.

Chris Goodall, an expert on energy who initially discovered the figures while investigating human use of food resources, commented, “The data shocked me. What it shows is for the first time since the Second World War, if you are poor you cannot afford to eat sufficient calories.”

#alimentation #pauvreté

Millions march in France after Charlie Hebdo shooting - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/01/12/fran-j12.html

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Behind the atmosphere of hysteria stoked up by the French political establishment and media is an attempt to impose a definite and reactionary political agenda. In a country that has seen two world wars and numerous revolutionary struggles, the killing of 12 people is being elevated to the level of an unprecedented national tragedy in a bid to revive the flagging fortunes of Hollande, France’s most unpopular president since World War II.

By appealing for national unity behind the police and security forces, Hollande is seeking to bolster the credibility of a government despised for its austerity policies, legitimize French participation in the reactionary, Washington-led “war on terror” in Africa and the Middle East, and facilitate right-wing political combinations in a desperate attempt to stabilize the state.

As Hollande’s invitation of National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Presidential Palace on Friday made clear, what is being considered is the further integration of the neo-fascist FN into mainstream French bourgeois politics. This underscores the authoritarian and anti-democratic evolution of European politics and the necessity for the unification of the European working class across ethnic and religious lines in a revolutionary struggle for socialism.

As masses of people do begin to reflect on the political issues bound up with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, it will occur to them that the French government itself bears political responsibility. The two Islamist gunmen who carried out the terrorist attack, Said and Cherif Kouachi, are themselves a particularly toxic product of the failure of capitalism to offer any hope to broad layers of the working masses.

Muslim youth suffer from extreme levels of unemployment, as high as 40 percent in some of France’s suburbs, where the Kouachi brothers found low-paid odd jobs on the margins of economic life. They face a stream of Islamophobic measures, such as bans on the burqa and Muslim headscarves. These tensions are intensified by French imperialism’s abandonment of its previous opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, aligning itself instead with US-led wars from Afghanistan to Libya and Syria and, once again, Iraq.