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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 (...)

By Philippe Bourbeau, Routledge Editions, 176 pages.
The international movement of people is provoking worldwide anxiety and apprehension. Nation-states around the globe, especially Western ones, are cracking down on migration for security reasons. International migration has become a key (...)

The world is tipping over into unknown territory. All the pundits are now starting to agree with US economist, Nouriel Roubini, famous for his prediction of the 2008 financial crash, that a second recession is inevitable. South Africa’s Reserve Bank governor Gill Marcus has also added her (...)

The world has experienced an explosion of openness. From individual artists opening their creations for input from others, to governments requiring publicly funded works be available to the public, both the spirit and practice of sharing is gaining momentum and producing results.
Creative (...)

“Yes we accepted to sell our land, but we had no choice...”, Community member, Bousra village
Economic land concessions (ELC) are long term leases granted over land for agro-industrial exploitation. Over the past years, ELCs have dramatically increased in Cambodia and are the subject of (...)

The Southeast Asian city-state strives to end its dependence on Malaysia for water
How does a city-state that has no natural water body, very little groundwater and even less land to store rainwater quench the thirst of its five million people? Singapore faces this question just as one of (...)

Important draft legislation was recently unveiled in Rajasthan that would impose serious punishment for ‘witch-hunting’. Getting legislators to sign off on the bill, however, will prove difficult.
Over the years, the women’s movement in Rajasthan has had some success in making violence (...)

Even as the elements of the roots of the current environmental and social crisis were already present at the Rio Conference of 1992, the consciousness of a finite and partially destroyed world, due to the irreversible character of the some phenomena (climate, biodiversity, resource depletion), (...)

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations to be hosted in Durban later this year, with this round of talks commonly referred to as COP 17, must not be seen in isolation of the troubled waters gnawing at the knees of multilateral environmental agreements (...)

The landmine is a morally outlawed weapon, and it is time now for Sri Lanka to accede to the Mine Ban Treaty.
SRI LANKA’S protracted internal conflict, which lasted for three decades, ended in May 2009, but landmines and other explosive remnants of war (ERW) continue to kill or injure both (...)

For some, food is a crisis of scarcity, but for many in U.S., it’s just the opposite. The book "American Wasteland" show us how much we squander and what we can do about it.
As a nation, we grow and raise more than 590 billion pounds of food each year. And depending on whom you ask, we (...)

The revolution in Libya, led by a motley group of democrats and Islamists and their imperialist allies, is likely to entrench the deep divisions in the country, writes Samir Amin, warning of the possibility of disintegration of the nation.
Libya is neither Tunisia nor Egypt. The ruling group (...)

On the morning of June 5, 2011, a 23-year-old African-American transgender woman, Chrishaun McDonald, and her friends were walking down Lake Street in Minneapolis. As they passed Schooner Tavern, Dean Schmitz, a 47-year-old white man, began shouting racial slurs at McDonald, asking, "Did you (...)

Several thousand people marched on Acapulco, Guerrero, this past Saturday chanting, “We don’t want war, we want education!” The march occurred during poet Javier Sicilia’s visit to the seaside city as his caravan of drug war victims makes its way to the Mexico-Guatemala border.
Acapulco was (...)

The Open Society Media Program has commissioned background papers on a range of topics that are important for understanding the effects of new technology on media and journalism. The papers accompany a series of reports, "Mapping Digital Media," on the impact of digitization on democracy in 60 (...)

In the commentary on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the news and infotainment media have predictably framed the discussion by the question of how successful the CIA and the military have been in destroying al Qaeda. Absent from the torrent of opinion and analysis was any mention of how the (...)

By the Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers, Pambazuka Press, 160 pages, 16.95£
Many outside South Africa imagine that after Mandela was freed and the ANC won free elections all was well. But the last two decades have led to increased poverty and inequality. Although a few black South Africans (...)

The civil society organizations that make up the Commission against Femicide (the murder of women) in Honduras expressed last week their indignation and concern at the increase in this phenomenon in the country and the fact that the authorities are showing "little or no interest" in it. They (...)

Africa is again becoming a “country” in the popular discourse of Western media intent on rebranding the entire continent as the eternal basket case.
Despite North Africa’s Arab Spring (which has inspired a global movement against corrupt and undemocratic leadership) and the birth of Africa’s (...)