By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY30 August 2010 WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand. More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state […]
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, August 16, 2010 (ENS) – The rapidly rising temperature of south Asia’s Andaman Sea has triggered coral bleaching and die-off that scientists working in Indonesia are calling one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded. The coral die-off was indentified though monitoring by marine ecologists from the Wildlife […]
Want to avoid the next food price crisis? Tired of unreliable rice and corn exporters? Why not buy up fertile land abroad and ship your own fresh, dependable supplies of foodstuffs and biofuels back home? That solution seems to make sense for more and more cash-rich, food-importing countries. Foreign land acquisitions and long-term lease-holdings, starting […]
July 18, 2010 (NNPA) – If global warming is a scientific fact, then we’d better be prepared for the earth to become a more violent place. That according to a recent Iowa State University study that shows as the earth’s average temperature rises, so too does violent tendencies in humans. Using U.S. government data on […]
By VIVIENNE WALTWed Jul 7, 2:15 am ET To the list of Big Oil companies with p.r. problems add two more: Chevron and French energy giant Total. In a report published on Monday, the NGO EarthRights International accuses the firms of being implicated in human-rights violations in Burma, claiming that soldiers guarding Chevron and Total’s […]
Urgent aid is needed to avert a catastrophe in West Africa By Alastair Stewart To the north of Niger, the creeping Sahara; to the south, oil rich and agriculturally lush Nigeria – this nation straddles the Sahel – dry, hot and cruel. It has suffered catastrophic droughts – 1974, 1984 and 2005. And now, another. […]
By ALLEN JOHNSON, NEW ORLEANS July 2, 2010 THE man appointed by US President Barack Obama to manage BP’s oil spill disaster fund has warned that “there’s not enough money in the world” to pay all claims, and suggested home owners with plunging property values could lose out. The warning from prominent US lawyer Kenneth […]
By Casandra Andrews, Press-Register Published: Sunday, June 27, 2010, 5:32 AM In March, officers with the Bayou La Batre Police Department responded to 470 calls, according to their records. Two months later — after a ruptured well began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, imperiling the fishing industry in five states and idling thousands […]
Damascus (AFP) June 22, 2010 – A severe four-year drought is devastating Syria’s rural communities, forcing them to abandon the country’s traditional breadbasket in the northeast for cities in search of employment. Earlier this month, the World Food Programme started delivering food aid to nearly 200,000 people in the provinces of Al-Hasakeh, Al-Raqqa and […]
Toya, Mali (AFP) June 22, 2010 – In single file, hundreds of residents of Toya wait patiently for meat distributed by the Red Cross who bought up thousands of starving animals to feed Mali’s drought-stricken population. With containers in hand they await the meat from four cows slaughtered in the village in the north-west […]
