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Violence against immigrants in South Africa has killed at least five people, resulted in attacks on businesses owned by foreigners and sent thousands to take refuge at temporary shelters.

A massive rally against xenophobia was held Thursday in Durban, the coastal city that has been the scene of much of the unrest. Migrants from Africa and South Asia have been the target of the violence, which was condemned by President Jacob Zuma.

The fighting in Durban killed five people – two immigrants and three South Africans, CNN reported.

The charity Gift of the Givers told CNN that about "8,500 people fled to refugee centers or police stations this week because of the violence."

In Johannesburg Thursday, foreign-owned shops were attacked and looted, the BBC reported, prompting some 200 people to take refuge at a police station.

The BBC adds: "Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the looters and arrested 12 people. ,.. Police used rubber bullets to disperse a group of migrants in Johannesburg who had armed themselves with machetes for protection."

The unemployment rate in South Africa is 24 percent, and many in the country accuse foreigners of taking jobs. The violence, which has been widely condemned in South Africa, has been attributed to comments made by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini who was quoted as saying foreigners should "go back to their countries." He says his remarks were misrepresented.

South African officials have apologized to their African counterparts for the violence.

Anti-immigrant violence in 2008 killed more than 60 people.

South Africa

Immigration

Pope Francis, who plans to visit the United States in September, might tack onto his itinerary a side trip to Cuba, the Vatican says, but it cautions the talks with Havana are at an early stage.

The Catholic Heraldquotes Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi as saying Francis is "considering the idea of a Cuba leg."

The Herald notes:

"In what will be the Pope's first trip to the US, the Pontiff will travel to Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia in September. He will join a session in Congress and be hosted by President Obama in the White House.

"A visit to Cuba would be a historic addition to this itinerary. Pope Francis has already played a major role in the re-opening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US, last summer writing letters to both Barack Obama and Raul Castro that eventually led to the release of US prisoner, Alan Gross."

Francis is credited with helping broker a breakthrough in relations between Washington and Havana following a decades-long Cold War freeze. Both of his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, have also visited the predominately Catholic island-nation.

Pope Francis

Cuba

If there's one piece of hardware that can be found on nearly every trader's desk, regardless of time zone, it's the Bloomberg data terminal.

So, when the terminals experienced a global outage lasting hours, it sent chaos through markets where the "screens" are relied upon to analyze and interpret financial data — and to exchange market gossip with other traders around the world.

Zero Hedge, a financial news site, says the outage led to "widespread panic among traders mostly in Europe, who were flying blind and unable to chat with other, just as clueless colleagues (the one function used predominantly on the terminal is not charts, nor analytics, but plain old chat)."

Service now restored to most customers following disruption to parts of our network. Making progress bringing the full network back online.

— Bloomberg LP (@Bloomberg) April 17, 2015

The Wall Street Journal quoted Louis Gargour, the chief investment officer at London-based LNG Capital as saying "We're flying blind."

"It's scary how dependent we have become on our Bloomberg screens," Anthony Peters, a strategist at London-based capital markets adviser SwissInvest, was quoted by WSJ as saying.

Reuters, which is a Bloomberg competitor, quoted Ioan Smith, managing director of KCG Europe, as saying that traders had to "catch up" on important market chatter "after the Bloomberg terminals came back online, and that's when we saw the falls in Europe."

The Associated Press adds the problems "prompted the British government to postpone a planned 3 billion-pound ($4.4 billion) debt issue."

"Users say the outage started as trading was getting in full swing around 8 a.m. in London, one of the world's largest financial centers, particularly in foreign exchange and bond markets."

CNBCsays Bloomberg confirmed that the outage began about 8:20 a.m. London time and that service was restored to most users by 12:45 p.m.

AP notes: "The disruption is likely to cause concern at Bloomberg. The company has become the world's biggest financial information provider, overtaking rival Reuters. Bloomberg is privately held and is not obliged to divulge financial information, but it said in September that its revenue grew to more than $9 billion in 2014, with 320,000 subscribers globally."

stock exchange

Economy

The World Bank's goal is to end extreme poverty and to grow income for the poorest people on the planet.

The bank does this by lending money and giving grants to governments and private corporations in some of the least developed places on the planet. For example, money goes to preserving land, building dams and creating health care systems.

But a lot of poor people actually end up worse off because of those projects, a report from The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found.

People are often displaced, or their livelihoods are ruined. Over the past decade an estimated 3.4 million people have been displaced by bank-funded projects, says Michael Hudson, a senior editor at ICIJ, who worked on the report. In one instance, hundreds of families had their homes burned down.

i

Dr. Jim Yong Kim became president of the World Bank in 2012. He is the first bank president who to come from the global health sector. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Dr. Jim Yong Kim became president of the World Bank in 2012. He is the first bank president who to come from the global health sector.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

"The World Bank has promised 'do no harm,' but our reporting has found that the World Bank has broken this promise," Hudson says.

In response, the World Bank says the vast majority of its projects don't involve the resettlement of people. But the bank says it has identified shortcomings in its resettlement policies. And it plans to improve those policies to protect people and businesses affected by bank-funded projects.

ICIJ's Hudson spoke to NPR's Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition about the new report, which he and his team worked on with The Huffington Post and other outlets.

A lot of these projects seem beneficial. But you found that something is going wrong. What is it?

What is often going wrong is what happens to people on the ground when you do these big projects. When you build a big dam, that can have huge consequences for the people living along the banks of the rive and people who make their living via subsistence fishing or farming along the river bank. A mega dam can affect 50,000, even a 100,000 people.

What happens to the people displaced?

In some cases they may have to move. Or they may lose part of their land. In other cases, they may not be physically displaced but rather economically displaced because their livelihoods have been destroyed, or at least partly impacted.

Parallels

The World Bank Gets An Overhaul — And Not Everyone's Happy

If you make your living fishing from the river or along the coast, and a power plant or dam affects the ecosystem, there's fewer fish, and you're not catching as many. Then your livelihood and your ability to feed your family has been impacted.

The problem is that even resettlements that are done well and fairly often leave poor people even poorer. There's a lot of research that shows that people who are forced to move suffer higher rates of hunger, illness and early death. It causes really serious consequences for people.

You write about a land conservation project in Kenya. What went wrong there?

The land conservation project funneled money to the Kenyan forest service with the idea of preserving a forest in western Kenya. The problem is with the thousands of indigenous people — the Sengwer — living in the forest. Our reporting on the ground shows that hundreds, and perhaps as many as a thousand, homes have been burned by the Kenyan forest service as they try to evict people from the forest.

When you brought these cases to the World Bank's attention, how did they react?

Around the first of March, we told the bank that our reporting had found systemic gaps in its protection for displaced families. Days later, the bank announced that it had found major problems with how it handles resettlement and released an action plan to fix the problem.

The bank has also released internal reports going back several years, which show the bank often had violated its own rules, has failed to protect people, has failed to monitor what happens to them and hasn't held its part as accountable for their actions.

Is it inevitable, on some level, that people may be harmed when you replace a low-level economy with a corner of the global economy via these projects?

There's always a price tag for development. But the question is: Who should pay the price? Should poor people be the ones who sacrifice when the government tries to do a big project? Even the World Bank says the budget for a project should include money to cover people's losses, that you can't just show up at someone's house and tell them to leave, that there has to be a process and that people have to be made whole.

global development

World Bank

Kenya