It's a bumper year for 40th anniversaries, especially for the United States: assassinations, moonwalks, war, protest. Elsewhere there were coups, decolonisation, nuclear tests. 1968 was also the year of the Prague Spring and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, student riots in Paris, violence and starvation on a mass scale in Biafra (Nigeria). Last week was the […]
Advancing the global campaign against explosive remnants of war, Belgium has taken the unprecedented step of banning investment in companies that manufacture cluster bombs. Belgium banned the weapon itself a year ago. Cluster munitions spread ‘bomblets’ — hundreds or thousands at a time — over wide areas from 1 to 20 square kilometres. Unlike landmines, […]
Leading economist Jeffrey Sachs says ending poverty will relieve security concerns of rich nations. Dr Sachs, best-selling author of The End of Poverty currently serving as Special Adviser to the UN on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), says conflict in places such as the Horn of Africa is fuelled by poverty: "This isn’t a crisis […]
Homeless people in France will have legal redress if a draft bill is passed in the current parliamentary session. Homelessness was forced onto the French political agenda when fires in inadequate, overcrowded Paris housing killed almost 50 people in 2005. The issue has been kept alive by the ‘Children of Don Quixote’, a small voluntary […]
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