By Erick Kabendera12 June 2013 ZANZIBAR (IPS) – Khadija Komboani’s nearest well is filled with salt water thanks to the rising sea around Tanzania’s Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar. And until recently, the 36-year-old mother of 12 from Nungwi village in Unguja on the northernmost part of Zanzibar, spent most of her day walking to […]
By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Alastair Macdonald, Tom Pfeiffer, and Kevin Liffey9 June 2013 CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s foreign minister, vowing not to give up “a single drop of water from the Nile”, said on Sunday he would go to Addis Ababa to discuss a giant dam that Ethiopia has begun building in defiance of […]
By MD. ASADULLAH KHAN8 June 2013 (The Daily Star) – With two centuries of an unprecedented population boom, likely to reach 9 billion by 2050, land degradation by human activities and climatic upheavals poses a threat to food security, especially in a land-scarce country like Bangladesh. Historically known, it took the human species about 150,000 […]
Dr. Fred Boltz 29 May 2013 (Conservation International) – This week in New York City, the 27 members of the high-level panel of eminent persons appointed by the U.N. Secretary General will deliver a report providing recommendations on the post-2015 development agenda. This is a critical opportunity to address the inadequacies of the Millennium Development […]
By Stephen Leahy31 May 2013 REYKJAVÍK, Iceland (IPS) – Soil is becoming endangered. This reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting here in Reykjavík. And a big part of reversing soil decline is carbon, the same element that is overheating the […]
By Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent 24 May 2013 (The Guardian) – The majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will live with severe pressure on fresh water within the space of two generations as climate change, pollution and over-use of resources take their toll, 500 scientists have warned. The world’s water systems would soon […]
By KARIN LAUB 11 May 2013 SOUK AL-JUMMA, Tunisia (Associated Press) – On the day he chose to die, Adel Khedri woke up at 6:30 a.m., took his black backpack and headed down to the busy boulevard where he worked as a cigarette peddler. It was the last in a series of odd jobs that […]
By Jeffrey Kluger (TIME) – Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. Telescopes point in one direction: out. Of all the cosmic bodies studied in the long history of astronomy and space travel, the one that got the least attention was […]
[Des visited Arcosanti as a child and still has a couple of ceramic “windbells” hanging in the living room window.] PHOENIX, 9 April 2013 (Sante Fe New Mexican) – Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, who designed what for years was Santa Fe’s most popular music venue before moving on to Arizona to build a futuristic community […]
By William Wan3 April 2013 BEIJING (Washington Post) – In this country of almost 1.4 billion people, life is an unending struggle for resources — money, property, even spouses. And it doesn’t get easier in death. Prices for graves are skyrocketing, driven by decades of unbridled development and scarce city land. The government’s answer to […]
