Mine waste is everywhere. From cities to towns to farms to nature reserves, polluted water and air have landed on the doorsteps of millions of people.
When some multinational companies dump chemicals into the sea, they call it ”ocean fertilisation”. This practice is near the top of the agenda at the United Nations conference on biological diversity in Bonn that ends on Friday. Practically all developing countries want the conference to approve a moratorium on ocean fertilisation.
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/ 28 November 2007
Increasing international cooperation in exchange for guns and improving the sense of domestic security are promising strategies for reducing the number of small weapons in the hands of civilians in developing countries, a leading expert on the matter says. Keith Krause, programme director of the Small Arms Survey, says that taking weapons from civilians in developing countries is the toughest part of cutting down on the number of small arms around the world.
The European Union must substantially increase financial resources for research on a vaccine against HIV, which causes Aids, leading non-governmental activists say. Ann Katrin Akalin, spokesperson of the German Aids Foundation, says the EU is contributing only 6% of the world’s total public financing for research on a vaccine.
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/ 15 January 2007
Of more than 30 000 African refugees who landed on the Spanish Canary Islands last year, few had time to see the statue towering above the small port Garachico. And if they did, few could have understood what it meant. It is the statue of a man dragging suitcases in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean.
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/ 23 December 2006
Ocean levels will rise faster than expected if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, a leading German researcher warns. Using Nasa data, Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of physics of the oceans at the University of Potsdam near Berlin, estimates that the sea level could rise by 140cm by 2100.
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/ 1 December 2006
<img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/291293/aidsday06.gif" align=left>Immigrant women are becoming some of the main victims of new HIV transmissions in several European countries, especially in France, according to official figures. A third of all new HIV infections detected in France in 2005 affect an immigrant from sub-Saharan Africa.
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/ 24 November 2006
An international arrest warrant against nine close aides of Rwanda’s Tutsi President, Paul Kagame, on a charge of participating in the assassination of former Hutu leader Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994 has led to a new diplomatic war over Rwanda. A French judge this week ordered the arrest of nine high-ranking Rwandan officials.
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/ 16 November 2006
The new African-Chinese economic and diplomatic partnership, manifested in the pact signed by China and 48 African countries in Beijing this month, is unsettling European leaders and analysts, who continue to see Africa as Europe’s backyard. Analysts have been calling attention to China’s growing presence in Africa for many months.
Felix Moncada Suarez and his family had prepared themselves to board the flight from Roissy airport near Paris for the Ecuador capital Quito on the evening of May 19. It was not a flight they wanted to take. At the very last minute, the ministry of the interior reversed its ruling to expel the family from France.