Annual Reviews - Home. Tech in Asia - Asia Tech News for the World. How a multinational beer giant is making bank by destroying the world's beer and laying off the world's brewers. SKS, world's largest microfinance service, drives debtors to suicide. The Associated Press has obtained portions of a suppressed independent investigation into the role that debt collectors working for microfinance giant SKS played in the suicides of desperately poor borrowers in the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh.
SKS made global headlines when it received backing from a US venture capital firm, the Boston-based Sandstone Capital, and then had a highly successful IPO. The independent investigation, commissioned by SKS itself (though the company has disavowed it) documents a pattern of usurious practices by vicious debt-collectors working for the company that drove several borrowers to grisly suicide. The interview videos were shown to the AP by Uma Maheshwari, who said she was present during one set of recordings and visited several of the families personally.
She left SKS in July. Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal. Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States.
Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts. Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] Admit it: As you're reading this, you have tunnel vision — that feeling that the world is closing in on you after surfing the Internet for eight straight hours. Web dead head (yes, I made that up) is a growing concern for today's connected generation, which collectively spends 35 billion hours on the Internet every month. But we're not just talking one online shopping experience at a time. Often, we have four tabs open, cycling between emails and shopping, tweeting and word processing. Such multi-tasking actually raises stress levels and lowers creative thinking overall, according to the research compiled by ForensicPsychology.net.
Student Loans on Rise.