The month of October is TransFair USA’s Fair Trade Month, and the 2010 theme is “Every Purchase Matters”. The goal behind this years theme is to stress and illustrate how individuals can get involved with Fair Trade and what impact that can have on farmers and laborers across the globe. TransFair USA is the United States’s only third-party certifier […]
By Shrabani Basu In the summer of 1887 as Queen Victoria approached the Golden Jubilee of her reign, she was overcome with feelings of loneliness. She had never stopped mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert, who had died in 1861, and had chosen to wear widow’s black all her life. As she looked ahead […]
Here’s an interesting idea from Robert Wright, writing in The New York Times. The Palestinians should give up on negotiations, reject violence, and begin peaceful demonstrations asserting that they should be given the right to vote in Israel. This movement would “gain immediate international support” and in “Europe and the United States, leftists would agitate […]
The Urban Green Council is the NYC Chapter of the US Green Building Council. The New York City folks are very active, extremely creative and progressive, and forging true global leadership in green building and design. I attended their inaugural Urban Green Expo last year, and went again this year. The theme this year of […]
Watch Jon Stewart talk to Linda Polman, the author of “Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?”
Farmers in Uganda have started to use human urine as fertilizer for their crops. They have found the urine to be “first rate” in aiding plant growth, and especially handy for getting rid of banana pests. And fetilizer in Uganda can run $70 a bag, where pee costs nothing! Rose Nabirye, a farmer from Mayuge in […]
You may have noticed that one of the post categories for this blog is “U.S. Aid” and posts under that category are devoted to news and commentary about U.S. efforts to provide financial and humanitarian assistance to other countries. I see this as one of the pillars of the traditional U.S. role in the world. […]
Why do countries act like big babies? I bring this up in reaction to the U.S.’s walkout during Ahmadinejad’s UN speech last week. Now I know, he was suggesting that the U.S. government’s explanation of 9/11 might be inaccurate, and many Americans may view this as “hateful and offensive,” as Obama said. But Ahmadinejad was […]
Last week the United Nations held a summit on the Millennium Development Goals. This is a set of venerable aims laid out in 2000 and intended to be accomplished by 2015. They include things like improving gender equality and ending extreme poverty. While some people indeed treat them as something to strive for, the goals […]
As noted here in my last post, Avner Cohen has drawn an important contrast between Israel’s strategic position with respect to Iran today and its position when it first confronted the danger of an Iraqi bomb, thirty years ago. In 1979-80, Cohen correctly observed, Israel stood essentially alone: Though Saddam had started to mess with […]
Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr will not be up and running until next year, according to reports from the Iranian atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi. Iran began loading Russian-made fuel rods into the plant in August with the expectation that the plant would be connected to the national power grid by October. […]
From the African Development Bank: Tunis – The Board of Directors of the African Development Fund (ADF), the concessional window of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group approved on Monday, 27 September 2010 in Tunis, a UA 63.369-million* (U.S.$ 95.6 million) loan to fund the Nacala Corridor Phase II Road project (NCRP) in Zambia The […]
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