Tous les articles et traductions

Land Grab Projects?

By Lyla BAVADAM

, by Frontline

An independent study says some 250 thermal power projects that have got clearances may be meant just to grab land and water resources.
THERE have been a growing number of headlines that speak of an energy crisis and the energy deficit in India in the last few years. The disparities in the (…)

The Supporters of Democracy Must Welcome Political Islam

By Wadah Khanfar

, by The Hindu

From Tunisia to Egypt, Islamists are gaining the popular vote. Far from threatening stability, this makes it a real possibility.
Ennahda, the Islamic party in Tunisia, won 41 per cent of the seats of the Tunisian constitutional assembly last month, causing consternation in the West. But (…)

Resistance to Dam Project Grows in South Gujarat

By Priyanka Borpujari

, by Infochange

People from 16 villages on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border have been demonstrating their resistance to the Par-Tapi-Narmada river interlinking project, another multi-dam project which is slated to submerge 3,572 hectares of forests and displace 25,000 people.
[...] The project is part of the (…)

Cuba: Blogger and Scholar Ted Henken on New Media in Cuba

, by Global Voices

The first post in this two-post series featured highlights from a discussion between bloggers in Cuba, the United States (US), and Spain focusing on the use of new media in Cuba, where Internet access and technological tools are extremely scarce.
For this post, I interviewed City University of (…)

The crisis and the change-makers

By Paul Rogers

, by OpenDemocracy

In the face of the world’s urgent economic and environmental problems, political leadership is failing. But from the ground up, new tools of understanding are emerging to fill the gap and point a way forward.
The world’s financial crisis is deepening, and protests are spreading across the (…)

The People’s Energy

By M V Ramana and Suvrat Raju

, by India together

When nuclear companies are unwilling to stake their financial health on the safety of a reactor, how can the Government ask local residents to risk their lives, ask M V Ramana and Suvrat Raju.
As the local people determinedly continue to resist the commissioning of the Koodankulam reactors, (…)

The road to Rio+20 is paved with corporate environmentalism

By Meera Karunananthan

, by rabble.ca

For decades, the industries that thrive on destroying the planet have played a cat and mouse game with the environmental movement. We expose their bad practices and build public opposition, they co-opt our language and attempt to neutralize public opinion by creating confusion.
While in (…)

The Contradictions of the Arab Spring

By Immanuel Wallerstein

, by Al jazeera

The spirit of 1968 flows through Arab Spring and Occupy movement - as its counter-current attempts to suppress uprising.
The turmoil in Arab countries that is called the Arab Spring is conventionally said to have been sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in a small village of (…)

Global Peace Threatened

, by Social Watch

More than 300 civil society organizations submitted their proposals for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio2012). In its paper, Social Watch remembered that the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 stated that “the major cause of the continued deterioration of (…)

Libya recolonised

By Aijaz AHMAD

, by Frontline

Libya is the first country that the Euro-American consortium has invaded exclusively on the pretext of human rights violations.
FROM Kabul in October 2001 to Tripoli in October 2011, a decade of unremitting planetary warfare has seen countries devastated and capitals occupied over a vast (…)

Bill Gates (the .001%) Joins the 99% for Robin Hood Tax

By Sarah Anderson

, by Common Dreams

One of the world’s richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.
The world’s second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate (…)

Decadal journeys: Debt and despair spur urban growth

By P. Sainath

, by Infochange

Census 2011, which reports a higher growth of urban population than rural as millions give up farming, does not record footloose migration, which drives desperate people to search for work in multiple directions with no clear destination. This is a giant drama that we have not even begun to (…)

The Secret Garden

By Sayantan Bera

, by Down to earth

Want to know about a lost variety of rice or a cure to asthma? Answers lie in the notebooks of schoolchildren and women of the Sundarbans and Madhyamgram, says Sayantan Bera.
[...]The documentation exercise “is like a class struggle in conservation,” a lucid Silanjan Bhattacharya had explained (…)

Food Security: Dividing the poor

By T.K. Rajalakshmi

, by Frontline

The flawed Bill on food security has not received the kind of publicity that the Lokpal Bill has, but that does not diminish its significance.
"THIS government has divided everything and everyone. There are different cards for different sections of the poor. If my employer, taking pity on me, (…)

No climate for Cleantech

By Latha Jishnu

, by Down to earth

Most of the clean energy innovations are with just six rich countries and hardly any technology is coming to developing nations.
What is the outlook for developing countries in getting clean energy technologies transferred to them at a reasonable fee? Will intellectual property rights (IPR) (…)

Bhutan: Pursuit of happiness

By Aditya Batra

, by Down to earth

Karma Tshiteem is the secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, the novel name of Bhutan’s Planning Commission. He tells Aditya Batra how the concept has fared in the new democracy:
"There can be elements of subjectivity in the GNH Policy Screening Tool. We are taking 26 variables (…)

End of Emergency

By R.K. Radhakrishnana

, by Frontline

Two years after the LTTE’s decimation, President Mahinda Rajapaksa proposes the lifting of the state of emergency in Sri Lanka.
A day before the delayed debate on Sri Lankan Tamils took off in the Indian Parliament and just over a fortnight before the 18th regular session of the United Nations (…)