Two years ago singer-songwriter and activist Bob Geldof was so excited about biofuels he even became the special advisor to biomass company Helius. At the time, Geldof visited jatropha curcas plantations in Swaziland run by UK biodiesel producer D1 Oils. Geldof was quoted as saying that these plantations had 'life changing potential'. Since then, D1 Oils dropped out and Mr Geldof silenced.
The sandy track cutting through Mobile outdoor classroom
With the world's attention focused on climate change, one of the methods suggested to reduce global carbon emissions is causing the displacement of indigenous persons as western companies rush to invest in tree-planting projects in developing countries.Benet Girl at Work
A Canadian mining company is prepared to bring hundreds of millions of dollars in gold out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of Africa's most embattled and poorest countries. One expert says that to extract gold, the company will have to cut a deal with a violent African militia.Mining in DRC
Nineteen-year-old Ibrahim Hussein Leibeit shifts his weight in obvious discomfort. The stump of his leg, blown off below the knee by a landmine on 10 April, just three weeks ago, is yet to heal. 'The pain is horrible,' he tells me. 'But today it is possible for me to think about other things.' Leibeit is a refugee. He was born and raised in the isolated camps in south western Algeria, where an estimated 165,000 Saharawi people who fled their native Western Sahara have lived for over three decades.Photo: David Bollero
In October 2008, Human Rights Watch rated Somalia the most ignored tragedy in the world. Almost 1.5 million Somalis are internally displaced, and an additional half million are refugees. Two decades of instability, including a U.S.-backed intervention by Ethiopian troops in December 2006, have failed to put Somalia on the map. If the American public has thought about Somalia at all this decade, it was as the setting of the popular 2001 movie Blackhawk Down, based on the October 1993 battle in Mogadishu between U.S. troops and Somali militia, rather than as a real place where Washington's policies were fueling conflict and prolonging suffering.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019