If they knew him at all, the world knew Nigerian Oronto Douglas as the former attorney for the writer, playwright and Ogoni human rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa. Despite Oronto’s and even President Bill Clinton’s best effort, Ken was framed and hanged in 1995 together with 8 other Ogoni men who dared resist Shell Oil’s drilling in their homeland under former dictator Sani Abacha. Or perhaps the world knew Oronto as a top advisor to the former president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan.
Author: WHES
The feminization of farming
ACROSS the developing world, millions of people are migrating from farms to cities in search of work. The migrants are mostly men. As a result, women are increasingly on the front lines of the fight to sustain family farms.
Climate change and food prices: the scary hidden stressors
IN her introduction to a compelling new study, “The Arab Spring and Climate Change,” released Thursday, the Princeton scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter notes that crime shows often rely on the concept of a “stressor.” A stressor, she explains, is a
Landgrabbing for biofuels must stop
Zainab Kamara is one of several thousand farmers in Sierra Leone whose lands have been taken over by the Swiss company Addax Bioenergy for a 10,000 hectare sugar cane plantation to produce ethanol for export to Europe.
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
“An overseas empire produces a vast sea of paper,” John Darwin writes. That sea — wide, deep and often treacherous — is what remains of the British Empire for historians to trawl, though few attempt to chart the whole of it in one relatively compact volume. Darwin managed something similar with his previous books “The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970” and “After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405” — emerging from the imperial brine with poise and balance where lesser historians would have beached themselves like lost whales or glugged down to the depths, tangled in the tentacles of a giant squid. In “Unfinished Empire,” he turns his attention to the British Empire’s why, who and how: small words that signify very big questions.
Detroit: An American Autopsy
Detroit is one of those taxing places that require you to have an opinion about them. This opinion expresses no mere preference. It amounts to a stance, from which may be inferred your electoral leanings, your racial politics, your union sympathies and the general sunniness of your disposition. The entire city signifies. It can get tiring.
600 homeless children in DC, and no one seems to care
I don’t care what we call our football team. I don’t care about Lance Armstrong’s doping or RGIII’s knee, or whether Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o knew his dead girlfriend never existed in the first place, or any of the other sports dramas we’ve spent gobs of energy on in these past few weeks.
The persistence of racial resentment
Although there was plenty of discussion during the 2012 presidential campaign about the Hispanic vote and how intense black turnout would be, the press was preoccupied with the white vote: the white working class, white women and upscale whites.
How effective is the safety net?
Nicholas Kristof published an important column in the New York Times recently about young children in some poor communities who face greatly diminished opportunities by the time they’re just 2 years old.[1] “Many low-income children never reach the starting line,” he notes.
The global farmland rush
OVER the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for agriculture.
