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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 (…)

They’ve been ‘occupying’ Wall Street for almost a month, but people looking for information on what it’s all about are forced to go offshore for television journalism that will explain it to them. Mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protest in the United States has been (…)

Gaddafi’s killing - with all the hallmarks of a ’coordinated assassination’ – marks ’one more episode ion this NATO war in Libya and North Africa’, writes Horace Campbell. The ’remilitarisation of Africa and new deployment of Africom is a new stage of African politics,’ says Campbell.
The news (…)

It could be argued that the climate change issue has become less about climate justice and more about new profits.
In South Africa, the concept of the green economy is abuzz with nervous energy. There have been numerous conferences on the subject in light of the upcoming United Nations Climate (…)

Introduction
With the dominant neoliberal model of the economy causing one crisis after another, the search for alternative development pathways has become an urgent necessity. By linking the macro and the micro economic levels, WIDE wants to facilitate and support processes which challenge (…)

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, Tom Joad, the novel’s central character, a man who has been made poor and who is on the run from the law, tells his mother in the climactic scene that: “I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and (…)

LRAN Briefing Paper Series no. 2
On World Food Day, it is estimated that almost a billion people around the world are now suffering from hunger and malnutrition - a dramatic rise in number since the soaring food prices over the last three years. Of these, about half are estimated to live in (…)

The European Union is changing its rules on how carbon is traded in response to a series of fraud cases and the financial crisis. This report looks at how corporate lobbies are trying to influence this process, and notes that such measures are bound to fall short since they attempt to "regulate (…)

The Libyan war is often portrayed through a “tribal” lens that fails to explain how the country’s tribes coexist with a sense of nationhood.
The Libyan war has not been a tribal conflict. Yet throughout the seven months of fighting, much external commentary predicted and expected that the war (…)

A production model based on soy monoculture results in economic growth, but also causes social instability that can lead to political crises. The temptation is to use armed force to resolve them.
At the end of September, construction began on the World Trade Center of Asunción. The first step (…)

Arriving in Egypt the day before the September 9 protests that brought tens of thousands into the street, marches to the Ministry of Interior and the Supreme Court, and then the storming of the Israeli embassy, certainly threw me in at the deep end! But arriving in Cairo at almost any point (…)

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have defied many of its early critics, with tens of thousands of people still supporting those camped out at New York’s financial centre and the heart of US capitalism a month after the protests started.
It has since spread to over 70 cities across the (…)

Climate change predominantly impacts those who have benefited least from fossil fuelled industrialisation. The poor have less social, economic and political capacity to adapt to climate change than the rich. The arrival of the global climate negotiating lobby on African shores must focus the (…)

A plan to boost agribusiness, but based mainly on family farming and cooperatives, in Argentina is geared to producing and exporting more food – in a more sustainable manner.
That is the goal of the Strategic Agribusiness Plan (PEA) that representatives of the country’s 23 provinces and of 53 (…)

The idea of taxing international financial transactions is gaining ground. The European Union is promoting it internationally and studying the possibility of imposing it throughout the bloc, or at least in the euro area.
But it is still not clear what the scope of the tax would be or what the (…)

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a k a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at Liberty Plaza will have to be (…)

Will the host city for the November-December world climate summit, COP17, clean up its act? The August 23 launch of a major Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) report, Towards a Low Carbon City: Focus on Durban – offers an early chance to test whether new municipal leaders are climate (…)

With a crucial conference on climate change taking place in Durban, South Africa, in December, Patrick Bond cuts through the elite conspiracy that will result in a no deal scenario and a continued rise in global temperatures. ’The strongest possible stance will be needed to finally address the (…)

Nanoparticles are harmful, but India is yet to regulate their use
NANOTECHNOLOGY has revolutionised industry. It is used to improve wide ranging products, from cosmetics, toys and toothpastes to textiles and missiles. Industry thinks the technology holds promise to change every facet of life (…)

Next year, in June, world leaders will get together in the joyful city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to mark 20 years of UNCED—the Earth Summit (see Down to Earth, May 15, 1992).
Unbelievably, it will be 40 years since the Stockholm conference, when the question of the environment first caught (…)