Opinions
Julian Bond had the long view of this journey toward justice
Combing through the many tributes that have appeared since Julian Bond’s death, I was struck by one photograph in particular....
The end of polio in Africa?
AFRICA HAS reported some genuinely good news in the battle to eradicate polio. Late last month , Nigeria passed a full year without a case of wild poliovirus. As of Aug. 11, it has been a year since the last case was detected anywhere on the continent (it was in Somalia). These anniversaries are uno...
The GM labeling law to end all labeling laws
As the vitriol intensifies in what passes for debate over the safety of genetically modified foods, scientific inquiry, thankfully, continues. A Tufts researcher, Sheldon Krimsky, recently published his assessment of the last seven years of peer-reviewed evidence, finding 26 studies that "reported a...
The U.S. has 35,000 museums. Why is only one about slavery?
The United States is home to more than 35,000 museums that explore our nation’s culture and history. Restored plantations that commemorate the Old South are popular among them, celebrated as “bastions of a genteel culture” ( in the words of an official New Orleans Web site) and monuments to th...
The mystery of ISIS
Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factori...
Fit for whose purpose? Private funding and corporate influence in the United Nations
A critical issue repeatedly arising in the post-2015 negotiations relates to responsibility. There is shared responsibility, the preference of rich countries who would like to shift traditional official development assistance (ODA) and other “burdens” given the “rise” of some developing coun...
Don’t let food be the problem: Producing too much food is what starves the planet
In May, the United Nations announced that while globally there are 200 million fewer hungry people than there were 25 years ago, twice as many African countries are now suffering food crises. Moreover, Pacific islanders’ access to sanitation facilities is declining, and just over half of that popu...
Did the U.N. financing for development conference deliver?
ADDIS ABABA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A major United Nations summit to finance ambitious global development goals, from giving free education to all to dealing with climate change, fell short of developing countries' expectations with few aid pledges....
Ruthless power and deleterious politics: From DDT to Roundup
Morton Biskind, a physician from Westport, Connecticut, was a courageous man. At the peak of the cold war, in 1953, he complained of maladies afflicting both domestic animals and people for the first time. He concluded that the popular insect poison DDT was the agent of their disease. DDT, he said, ...
Address to the Second World Meeting of the Popular Movements
Pope Francis spoke about the problems faced by the poor and indigenous peoples at the Second World Meeting of the Popular Movements at the Expo Feria Exhibition Centre in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, on Thursday....
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