Monsanto has turned the drop in international corn reserves and the havoc wreaked on Mexican corn production by an unexpected cold snap into an argument for speeding up commercial planting of its genetically modified (GM) corn in Mexico. The transnational is claiming that its modified seeds are the only solution to scarcity and rising grain prices.
Despite Africa’s intention to empower its continental and regional organisations, the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States have failed to propose a determined solution for the post-electoral crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. Instead the prospect of a new civil war looms on the Ivoirian horizon.
As Japan’s government gets set to expand a nuclear evacuation area, the mayor of a city inside the radioactive zone speaks about his fears.
Since it is the 200th anniversary of the British Luddite protests this month, that movement has been getting some attention. Some of it has raised the valid and interesting question of whether those demonstrators of old should really be described as anti-technology.
The exhibition, “Artists in Exile: Forgotten Iraqi Refugees in Syria,” seeks to bridge cultural gaps between the United States and Arab and Middle Eastern countries.
U.S. human rights groups reacted angrily to the Justice Department’s announcement Monday that the self-acclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon will be tried before a military commission at the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba.
Two weeks before Nigeria’s election, Ike Okonta takes aim at progressive politics in Nigeria – or the lack thereof. He traces the crisis back to the rule of General Ibrahim Babangida in the 1980s, when universities were devastated by economic policy.
At the end of December, the first popular uprising in the region against a government of the left took place in Bolivia. It was caused by an excessive increase in the price of fuels. The event demonstrates the difficulties of entering into a truly alternative mode of development, but it also reveals the limits of the Bolivian government’s stated effort to re-establish and decolonize the state.
Japan is at present menaced by several concurrent, concatenating crises. But with smart and responsible energy policies and politics, it could pioneer approaches that help lead us all out of our increasing dire, energy-centred dilemmas.
With a new Congress with a House controlled by Republicans who have trumpeted deficit reduction as one of their central priorities, it would be logical to expect that there might be trimming in one of the largest and most bloated areas of US government spending: the nation’s $700bn military budget. However, the realities of Washington, DC are different than the rhetoric.