BALAWAS, INDIA - Chatan Singh, a farmer in the village of Balawas in Haryana, India, has planted two crops in his fields since June, but both have failed because of the scanty monsoon. A few years ago this would have been unthinkable because tube wells and a nearby canal could have made up for any shortfall in rain. But the canal recently ran dry and the wells are suddenly spewing out unusable saline water. When this year's rains went truant, Chatan's crops withered, leaving the father of eight deep in debt.
The beginning of the academic year once meant new clothes, shoes,
and notebooks. These days, it increasingly means new computers, iPods,
and mobile phones. One company, Apple, is giving away a "free" iPod to
every student, faculty, and staff who buys a MacBook. The word "free"
is terribly deceptive. The human cost of mineral extraction in the
high-tech industry remains intolerable.
In the
past month, two seemingly unrelated events have turned Central Asia
into a potential flashpoint: an aggressively expanding North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) and a nascent strategic alliance between
Russia and China.
At stake is nothing less than who holds the future high ground in the competition for the world's energy resources.
The U.S. Empire of Bases -- at $102 billion a year
already the world's costliest military enterprise -- just got a good
deal more expensive.
"We
cannot assure our development on our own," stated France's pet dictator
and Africa's longest-serving ruler, Omar Bongo. The Gabonese leader was
talking about national economic development, but he might just as well
have been talking about his own personal economic development.
Transparency International's French chapter singled out
Bongo, who died this month at 73 after ruling his country for 41 years,
for a spectacular misappropriation of state funds.
WASHINGTON - US dependence on fossil fuels and a vulnerable electric grid pose a perilous threat to the country's national security, retired military officers warned Monday in a report.
The threat requires urgent action and the Defense Department should lead the way in transforming America's energy use by aggressively pursuing efficiency measures and renewable sources, said the report by CNA, a nonprofit research group.
WASHINGTON - The world's mass consumption of cell phones, laptops and other electronics fuels widespread sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to a new study released Wednesday by the non-profit Enough Project that echoes what many human rights activists and humanitarian workers have been saying for years.
The world faces a bleak future over its dwindling water supplies, with pollution, climate change and rapidly growing populations raising the possibility of widespread shortages, a new report compiled by 24 agencies of the United Nations says.
The warning from the UN is based on one of the most comprehensive assessments the global body has undertaken on the state of the world's fresh water and was commissioned for use at a major international water conference being held next week in Istanbul.
The Iraq war was just the first of this century's "resource wars", in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities for themselves, according to the UK government's former chief scientific adviser.
Sir David King predicted that with human population growing, natural resources dwindling and seas rising because of climate change, the squeeze on the planet would lead to more conflict.
A swelling global population, changing diets and mankind's expanding "water footprint" could be bringing an end to the era of cheap water.
The warnings, in an annual report by the Pacific Institute in California, come as ecologists have begun adopting the term "peak ecological water" - the point where, like the concept of "peak oil", the world has to confront a natural limit on something once considered virtually infinite.
