The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Climate change is now officially a human rights issue. The un Human Rights Council on March 28 endorsed a resolution recognizing that global warming threatens the livelihoods and welfare of many of the world's most vulnerable people. The proposal, submitted by the Maldives, Comoros, Tuvalu, Micronesia and other low-lying countries, …
The former Liberian President Charles Taylor ordered militias to eat the flesh of their enemies, a former death squad leader has told during his war crimes trial. Joseph "Zigzag' Marzah said Taylor had instructed his fighters in Liberia to eat un peacekeepers to "set an example for the people to …
This paper highlights the impact of environmental degradation on migration. Through a gravity regression model, it assesses the impact of thirteen global environmental factors on migration flows across 172 countries of the world. After a general and brief overview of environmental degradation and migration and the current debates in the …
"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.' These are words of a national apology by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd issued on February 13. As parliament's first item of business, Australia's new government apologized to …
>> Sharing the stage with climate campaigner Al Gore is to open oneself to a self-flagellating guilt trip, Irish rock star Bono confessed at the annual gathering of world movers and shakers in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. "It's like being with an Irish priest. You start to confess …
An argument over a Valentine's Day gift leads shubhranshu choudhary to the politics of an aluminium ladder On the eve of Valentine's Day, a friend of my son persuades me to take my wife "out for dinner and buy her a nice gift'. I thank her for the idea but …
In New Zealand, where I live, and in Australia, the pro- us media is today loaded with anti-Chinese propaganda. Only one metropolitan daily newspaper in New Zealand is not controlled by pro- us interests. It regularly exposes us propaganda. For example, it found that claims of formaldehyde contamination in Chinese-made …
This report discusses a spectrum of human rights concerns raised by anthropogenic climate change and by the strategies devised to address it. It does not seek to reframe climate change as a "human rights issue' or to buttress the many existing grounds for urgent cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions …
This article outlines some key elements of a human-rights based approach to the compulsory acquisition of land. It shows that the compulsory acquisition of land often proceeds rapidly where the political, economic and legal power of those affected directly is weakest. While expropriation should be a powerful and beneficial tool …
On November 6, Norway's finance ministry barred the government pension fund from investing in the shares of Vedanta Resources Plc and its associates Madras Aluminium Company Limited and Sterlite Industries Limited on grounds of "severe environmental damages and serious or systematic violations of human rights'. The Council of Ethics for …
Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Dewey Watson has attracted a lot of flak for claiming that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites. In an interview to the Sunday Times, Watson, who in the 1950s helped identify dna, declared himself to be "gloomy about the prospect of Africa
Many in Rwanda are incensed at the bbc for allowing genocide revisionists to use the network's programme to "mock' victims of their crimes. The bitter reactions follow a 30-minute interview in which the president of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, Ignace Murwanashyaka, claimed there was no genocide. The …
In yet another incident of protest over pollution in China, thousands of villagers in Sichuan province protested a polluting brewery on July 29. The police clamped down on the protesters, a human rights group. The protest in Yuanshi town was against the state-run China Resources (Shifang) Breweries Co that was …
Kalavati Barai of Raipur Tea Estate in Jalpaiguri has been watching the consistent deterioration of her family of six over the past four years. In March this year, her husband succumbed to severe anaemia and related complications. "I couldn't feed him, so he died,' she states simply. Since the tea …
A pan-African music festival held in the Congolese capital of Brazzaville has aroused much outrage from civil rights groups for making 22 pygmy musicians stay in a zoo. Organisers of the week-long music festival, which ended on July 14, told the media that they had hoped to recreate the natural …
We are writing to make known to the international medical community the shocking imprisonment of Binayak Sen on May 14, 2007, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. A well known paediatrician and public-health specialist, Sen's is a rare example of the cost of involvement in civil rights activism by …
robert goodland, an environmental scientist, has come out with a report on Canadian mining giant Alcan's involvement with the Utkal Alumina and Bauxite Project in Kashipur, Orissa. The report reveals series of human rights abuses on adivasis protesting the project. Alcan has now withdrawn from the project. In an interview …
