Making food available for all without damaging the environment is one of the most important global challenges for the 21st century. The use of agricultural products in industrialized countries to make biofuels put at risk global food security. Land degradation, natural disasters related to climate change, declining water and energy resources are likely to have a negative impact on world food security.
The continent’s own elites, together with the West and now China, are still making Africans progressively poorer, thanks to the extraction of raw materials.
Since the 1994 coup d’etat that saw President Yahya Jammeh rise to power, the Gambian media has been forced to work under repressive and restrictive conditions.
A tense briefing on Rwanda’s August 9 elections demonstrated that politics still evoke a strong emotional response from many Rwandans, 16 years after their devastating genocide.
President Obama said, in his 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, that America should support strong institutions and not strong men. However in the case of Rwanda, this has been no more than rhetoric. Rwandans, like most Africans, cheered Obama’s election, hoping that it might signal a new, more peaceful and cooperative relationship between the U.S. and Africa, but Obama has expanded AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, and now he remains silent as Rwanda’s strongman, President Paul Kagame, prepares a sham presidential election to retain his brutal grip on power.
Greece’s dramatic debt crisis earlier this year drew attention to the failure of the international financial architecture to deal with sovereign debt crises in an orderly, fair, and transparent way. Yet Greece ’s problem isn’t new. Many impoverished nations struggle under crushing debt burdens, risking default or paying debts at the expense of critical domestic needs.
Emile YX? represents the positive face of hip-hop. As much community activist as public entertainer, he must be one of the most dedicated hip-hop practitioners on the globe.
We need a system that responds to the realities of immigration in this country while rejecting the knee-jerk discrimination that the Arizona law represents.
The oil industry’s reckless pursuit of extreme energy carries with it the inevitable risks of environmental and political peril. The Gulf oil spill is only the latest in a series of disasters. Arctic drilling, deals with African dictatorships, natural gas pipelines in Central Asia: the pursuit of fossil fuels has brought the United States into war, corruption, and ecological messes.