Equatorial Guinea this week accused Spain of trying to overthrow its government in an alleged plot by foreign mercenaries to kill the president. In an interview with The Guardian, President Teodoro Obiang’s special adviser, Miguel Mifuno, accused Madrid of sending a warship to the country with 500 marines on board.
In 1931 it stopped raining on the great plains of the American west and started blowing clouds of dust. Towns were engulfed, the crops withered and died, and over the next eight years at least 1-billion tons of topsoil was blown away and 2-million desperate people fled in the greatest mass migration of United States history.
Green and consumer groups on Wednesday claimed one of their greatest successes in a decade as the German biotech company Bayer withdrew its application to grow a variety of genetically modified (GM) maize in Britain, saying that constraints imposed upon it by the United Kingdom government had made the crop uneconomic.
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/ 6 February 2004
The end of the most pervasive product of the 20th century may come sooner than expected. World production of plastic bags is at an all-time high, but an additive developed in the United Kingdom is said to be reducing their lifespan from decades to just a few months.
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/ 5 December 2003
The Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (Wessa) has expressed its concern over the decision of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism to allow the controversial N2 toll road to run through the Eastern Cape.
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/ 21 November 2003
The mighty Coca-Cola corporation has given evidence to a small village council in southern India in an attempt to keep open a huge bottling factory, which is threatened with closure following allegations that it is sucking the community dry.
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/ 3 November 2003
ChevronTexaco could be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and be forced to spend more than -billion cleaning up pollution from 28 years of oil extraction in Ecuador, if a court case that has opened in a small frontier town on the edge of the Amazon forest finds against it.
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/ 29 October 2003
Two genetically modified (GM) varieties, oil-seed rape and sugar beet, face a Europe-wide ban after long-awaited field-scale trials showed that the crops damaged wildlife and would have a serious long-term effect on bee, butterfly and bird populations.
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/ 12 September 2003
Up to 10 000 of the poorest Mexican farmers and trade unionists marched on the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) opening meeting this week, demanding that small farmers be protected from international big business and that trade rules should not determine issues of food and health.
Whatever happened to the food crisis in Africa that Western charities, the United Nations and governments warned last year could engulf 25-million people? Did it never happen? Did they get it wrong? Did the rains come and the food suddenly grow? Did the world stump up enough cash and food?