Last Spring, while living in Port-au-Prince, I pitched a story about mounting food insecurity to an editor. “Interesting,” the veteran Caribbean reporter said, “maybe go down to that spot in Cité Soleil where they sell mud cakes? Get some color?” The image of poor Haitians eating dirt in the country’s most notorious slum has intermittently […]
Last year, I traveled to Swaziland, a country roughly the size of New Jersey surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique. Swaziland has about 1 million people, and has the unfortunate distinction of having the world’s highest rate of HIV/AIDS, 25.9%, and therefore a life expectancy of 48 years of age. I met an amazing cross […]
The Chinese government unveiled its defense budget for 2012 ahead of its annual full session of the National People’s Congress (China’s legislature), detailing an increase in military spending to 670.3 billion yuan (about $106 billion). This boost to military spending is the most recent in a “near-unbroken string of double-digit rises across two decades” and […]
Across parts of Africa the following scene is played out on a daily basis. A young girl of only 4 to 12 years old is held down by while she struggles to break free and screams from the excruciating pain that is being inflicted upon her. The image of a young girl being held down screaming in […]
On a recent edition of BBC Africa Debate, the issue of “the acquisition of millions of hectares of prime of farmland in Africa and the developing world by foreign investors” was subject of a panel discussion hosted by the BBC’s Alex Jakana and Justin Rowlatt that took place in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The debate […]
For millions of little girls across the world, childhood is brief. It is estimated that 10 million girls a year worldwide, the majority in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are married under the age of 18, some as young as seven or eight. According to UNICEF, more than 40% of the world’s child marriages occur in India. […]
On 2 March, the UN Human Rights Council released an extensive report (over 200 pages) covering extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, disappearances, torture, sexual violence, and attacks on civilians by armed parties in Libya. The report details activity undertaken by pro and anti-Gaddafi forces, as well as NATO’s air campaign. As most would agree, the Human Rights Council […]
With Vladimir Putin’s re-election for a six year term, and with him talking of helping himself to second-six year term after that, it is a good time to take stock of what Masha Gessen calls the “criminal tyranny” he has established in Russia. Gessen, the author of a an important new book about Putin published […]
The distinguished economist William Nordhaus has a succinct and useful piece in the latest issue of the “NY Review of Books” that refutes the now mildly famous letter to the Wall St. Journal from 16 scientists from January. (I am reminded of the famous quote from Erwin Chargaff about James Watson and Francis Crick: “That… […]
Just as the food crisis and famine in the Horn of Africa becomes manageable for aid groups, another crisis begins on the other side of the continent in the Sahel region of West Africa. On the edges of the Sahara Desert, drought is not uncommon, but is becoming more frequent with major food emergencies in […]
The budget cuts experienced by much of the Western world are predominantly viewed through the prism of job loss, shrinking pensions, and healthcare cuts. While these concerns are absolutely legitimate, the public as a whole – as opposed to a narrow group of politicians and policy experts – has not concerned itself much with the […]
The startling agreement announced today–the U.S. providing North Korea food aid in exchange for the North’s putting a moratorium on uranium enrichment, nuclear weapons tests and long-range missile testing–would seem by any reckoning a very positive step in the right direction. The mere fact that North Korea’s new leadership is putting the immediately nutritional needs […]
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