Climate change is inextricably linked to poverty. As the droughts continue and as the sea level rises, hundreds of thousands will be forced to resettle. The most recent conference on climate change in Copenhagen concluded that the climate is changing faster than previous models suggested. Rhetoric and fear mongering aside, these are serious issues with […]
President Obama has completed his first ever Russia Summit dealing with The Big Issue. Actually, I guess the status of nuclear forces used to be The Big Issue, those days are gone. Still, I have to admit to a certain sense of expectancy at seeing the U.S. and Russian presidents meet to discuss nuclear weapons […]
The popular news media is obsessing over Michael Jackson today with non-stop coverage of the memorial service in Los Angeles. I’ve never devoted any attention to celebrity news in this space and had not planned to consider it at all until I saw this Associated Press report. The report has me thinking about this in […]
As the American troops pull out from the everyday mayhem of trying to keep order in a country that seems tediously on the verge of implosion, Iraq’s gay and lesbian community have become prime targets for a new wave of violence. On the streets in the Shia strongholds of Sadr City, wanted posters of men are […]
I just had to flag this article, from the “NY Times” Sunday magazine, by Elizabeth Royte, a terrific writer with an unbeatable subject: Will Allen, an urban farmer who’s got a model that needs to be replicated, taught and otherwise advanced everywhere. This guy is really on it! He’s reducing waste (six million pounds of […]
In a lightly publicized event over the weekend, a trader in London at PVM Oil Futures, the largest oil trading firm, made “unauthorized” purchases of oil contracts at 2 am. The trades pushed the price of Brent crude up to $73.50/bbl on Tuesday, the highest price this year, before dropping to $66 by the end […]
Ethnic tensions are high in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in Western China. Rioters clashed with police – the largest protests in China in two decades – in the region’s capital, Urumqi, on Sunday and the Chinese state news agency reported that 156 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Over 1,400 people have […]
As President Obama heads to Russia to meet with the new and not so new Russian leadership to discuss nuclear arms control treaties, The New York Times offers this glimpse of the President’s vision for a nuclear-free world. I wanted to highlight this report because I’m rather interested in why the idea of a nuclear-free […]
On Friday the African Union (AU) announced it will not co-operate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in enforcing its March decision to charge Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under the Rome Statute establishing the court, any party to the statute is required to arrest al-Bashir if he enters […]
This past week at the UN-backed Tribunal in Cambodia, survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s infamous Tuol Sleng ‘S-21’ facility gave chilling accounts of the tortures they endured and witnessed – and in two cases, how their artwork saved them. The testimony comes as part of the trial of the former head of internal security and […]
Disarmament doesn’t usher in a safer world, arming with the right armaments, defensive armaments, does. […]
I want to mark July 4th, Independence Day for Americans, by noting a few good renewable energy stories. There are scores of these stories, all over the world, every week, and I’m just sharing what I think are some of the plums that I’ve been seeing. Renewables are a theme I’ve visited here time and […]
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