The Fragile States Index, produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, …
Victims of the Darfur genocide in Sudan, alongwith a few action groups and legal experts, recently demanded that environmental crimes committed during the mass killings also be accounted for and the perpetrators be tried in an international court. They demanded that the International Criminal Court (icc) in the Hague, the …
Conservationists have discovered massive herds of animals still existing in the war-ravaged southern Sudan. Aerial surveys done by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the government of South Sudan have confirmed that more than 1.2 million white-eared kob, tiang antelope, Mongalla gazelle and elephant are thriving in the region. Grasslands of …
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has urged Israel to immediately ease restrictions on the waters off the Gaza Strip. The request comes at the beginning of annual fishing high season. The UN body noted that Israel's restrictions have hit more than 40,000 people of the …
the first-ever debate on climate change in the un Security Council evinced strong protests from developing nations. The proposal by the uk asked for a discussion on climate change in the council since it posed a security threat. uk's foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, who chaired the 15-member body meeting on …
At least nine people were killed and many injured after a septic cesspool flooded a village in the Gaza Strip on March 27, 2007. As the cesspool, containing 20,000 cubic metres of sewage water, released a torrent of putrid water and waste, it buried 250 houses in the village of …
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, a documentary by Rory Kennedy, shows that torture in Iraq's infamous prison cannot be written off as excesses by over-belligerent soldiers. Culpability trickled upward all the way to Washington, it shows. The film focuses on the way people assigned as prison guards at Abu Ghraib so …
Pak pollution check The Rawalpindi city district government in Pakistan recently launched a plan to shift industrial units in Rawalpindi city to its suburbs to reduce pollution in the city. The plan requires industrial units causing soil and air pollution in residential areas to be shifted outside the city. The …
The World Diamond Council has expressed concerns over reports that rough diamonds from Zimbabwe are being smuggled into South Africa for sale into the world market under fraudulent
With Burundi, a small east African country, emerging from a 13-year-long civil war, more than 400,000 refugees have started returning home. Its newly elected government now faces the daunting task of land allocation, which could plunge the country back into civil war. Burundi experienced a mass exodus in 1972, following …
A n international agreement obliging warring countries to eliminate unexploded weaponry, which kill and maim long after the end of hostilities, came into force on November 12, 2006. The Protocol V on Explosive Remnants of War was ratified by 24 countries. Its entry into force "is the beginning of a …
in 2004, the British medical journal Lancet published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University of Nursing, usa and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, Iraq. More than a hundred thousand Iraqis had died due to war-related causes in the year following the invasion of their country …
In an effort to reduce battlefield contamination and health risks for the armed forces, the British arms manufacturer BAE Systems, the world's fourth largest defence contractor, is now working on lead-free bullets and a range of environmentally friendly armaments. According to a company spokesperson, the initiative is in response to …
Lebanon to sue Israel: Lebanon is preparing legal action to sue Israel for damages over a huge oil spill, which occurred when Israeli warplanes bombed the Jiyyeh power station on the Mediterranean coast off Beirut in mid-July. The bombing spilled around 110,000 barrels of oil into the sea and has …
• A British television channel has been criticised as "irresponsible' for making a drama in which US President George Bush is assassinated. Death of a President, on More4, uses actors and computer effects to portray the president being shot dead during an anti-war rally in Chicago in 2007. The makers …
Following a truce between Israel and the Hizbollah, cleanup of the huge oil spill off the coast of Lebanon has begun. Around 15,000 tonnes of oil had spilled into the Mediterranean after the Jiyyeh power plant near Beirut was hit in an Israeli airstrike between July 13 and 15 (see
