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The ambitious desire to close Guantánamo hailed the coming of a new era, a feeling implicitly recognised by the Nobel peace prize that President Obama received. Unfortunately, what we witnessed was a false dawn. The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of (…)

India has the largest number of stunted, wasted and underweight children in the world. Under-nutrition, as a “silent” emergency, haunts the lives of millions of Indian children. Several facts reveal the magnitude and severity of the nutritional crisis facing the country. Close to two million (…)

The first decade of the 21st century has been dominated by wars that have killed or injured close to half a million people, wars that arose after determined paramilitaries used parcel-knives to exploit the weaknesses of the world’s most advanced state. That incident might in principle have been (…)

In recent decades, Thailand has been running one of the world’s most successful national marketing campaigns. Building on its reputation for hospitality, beautiful beaches and splendid food, the tourism ministry has created an image of Thailand as an exotic paradise where travellers are ushered (…)

With this 40-page reportage published in Outlook India, Arundhati Roy becomes the first journalist to meet the Maoist rebels, or the Maoist Gonds, who are at war with the Indian state in the heart of India. Roy describes in depth how she fought her way through the forests with the rebels. She (…)

The Stockholm Programme, the latest in a series of EU agreements on security policy, was endorsed in December 2009. Based on the "principle of availability", the Programme plans to enable the cross-border collection, processing and sharing of data on a massive scale. Supposedly promoting (…)

DD Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis write in The Nation about the controversy surrounding Amnesty’s collaboration with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo prisoner.
Gita Sahgad, head of Amnesty’s gender unit, spoke in the press against this collaboration and was suspended from the human rights (…)

Kenya suffers from recurring drought. The situation during the past three years, however, has reached levels unparalleled in living memory.
"Kenya’s Hunger Crisis - the Result of Right to Food Violations" is the title of a report launched today by FIAN International and RAPDA. These words also (…)

The survivors of the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile are still scrambling to deal with the damage. Here, however, pundits are still scrambling to explain the dramatic difference in impact. Haiti’s quake on January 12 came in at 7.0 on the Richter scale, leveled the capital city, and (…)

Since Afghanistan now grows the opium poppies that provide more than 90% of the world’s opium, the raw material for the production of heroin, it’s not surprising that drug-trade news and war news intersect from time to time. More surprising is how seldom poppy growing and the drug trade are (…)

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India.
There is yet another significant shift in global power: from the (…)

As much as those who identify themselves as social progressives would like to believe otherwise, writes Dale McKinley, ‘the reality is that South Africa is a bastion of social conservatism’. One of the most glaring contradictions of South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘transition’, says McKinley, ‘is (…)

In the London Review of Books, Tariq Ali tells about his recent trip to Yemen, after Obama and other US politicians started hinting that this country might become a new frontline yet in the ’war on terror’.
Recounting the country’s history since World War II, and in particular the war and (…)

This week, California will host the Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies. The conference follows hearings last week in the US House of Representatives and a report from the UK Committee on Science and Technology, as well as a recent report from the Government (…)

When most people think about the recent upheavals in Iran, they think of marches demanding democracy and challenging the June 12 presidential election. The face of those protests is the “Green Movement” — so called because its supporters wear green —that put millions of people into the streets (…)

UN-HABITAT launched its report State of the World Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide in the run up to the World Urban Forum 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The world’s mega-cities are merging to form vast "mega-regions" which may stretch hundreds of kilometres across countries and be (…)

It might be the world’s largest free trade area, writes columnist Walden Bello, but Southeast Asia is still getting a raw trade deal from China. Read

African pastoralism has been dismissed as outdated and inefficient. But awareness of its social and environmental benefits is growing. Read more here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

Upsetting the Offset engages critically with the political economy of carbon markets. It presents a range of case studies and critiques from around the world, showing how the scam of carbon markets affects the lives of communities. But the book doesn’t stop there. It also presents a number of (…)

As most countries miss deadline to demonstrate openness on petroleum, mining revenues, an international initiative that seeks to promote more openness about how countries profit from their oil, gas, and mining resources should not weaken its modest membership standards because governments are (…)