Human trafficking occurs throughout the world but has become increasingly more prevalent in the country of Iraq due to the instability produced by the Iraq War. Many Iraqi women and girls are widowed or orphaned by wartime casualties. Currently, more than 50,000 Iraqi women have fled to Jordan and Syria and are trapped in sexual [...]

Many people do not realize that there is a swirling mass of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean that qualify as the planet’s largest garbage dump.  The 5 Gyres Project estimates that there are 315 billion pounds of plastic in the oceanright now. Much of the world’s trash has accumulated in part of [...]

A program dating back to the Eisenhower era of emergency measures for an America devastated in a nuclear attack is now converted to bestow secret powers on the president for anything he considers an emergency. The National Emergency Centers Establishment Act (HR 645), recently introduced in Congress, calls for the establishment of “national emergency centers” [...]

In Kamunera location of Mt. Elgon District in Kenya, more than 100 girls were rescued by the Maendeleo ya Wanawake organization before facing genital mutiliation, a practice still widespread in spite of government attempts to end the practice. Female genital mutiliation (FGM), which involves the partial or total removal of external female genitalia, is a [...]

The Obama administration has distributed out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted exemptions from basic environmental errors. The administration’s main goal in Energy Secretary Steven Chu words was to “get the money out and spent as quickly as possible”. They are trying to boost the economy [...]

Although Apple claims to be a socially responsible company, some of its suspected Chinese suppliers, such as Foxconn, Dafu and Lian Jian Technology, routinely violate China’s “Law on the Prevention and Control of Occupational Diseases.” A report from China’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, “The Other Side of Apple,” criticized the company for harmful environmental [...]

Lethal superbugs that do not respond to any known drugs are emerging. The World Health Organization states that the New Delhi, or NDM-1, superbug was recently found in UK patients who had traveled to countries such as India or Pakistan and has reached a critical point. These superbugs are resistant to carbapenem antibiotics, a major [...]

In May 2010, six months after an earthquake destroyed Haiti, the American multinational corporation Monsanto donated to the country 60 tons of corn and vegetable hybrid seed. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) took charge of the seed distribution. A month later, on 4 June 2010, around 10,000 Haitian farmers demonstrated against Monsanto’s [...]

In a new report entitled “Whose Aid is it Anyway?”, Oxfam has found that “billions of dollars in international aid, which could have transformed the lives of many people in some of the poorest countries in the world, was spent on unsustainable, expensive and dangerous aid projects that international donor governments used to support their [...]

Concern is growing over the health impact of growing and eating genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The World Health Organization has identified allergenicity, antibiotic resistance, gene transfer, outcrossing, GM genes introduced into the wild population, gene stability, susceptibility of non-target organisms (insects) and loss of biodiversity as potential issues of using GM seeds. Currently, most health [...]