Cluster bombing
The outbreak of Ebola fever in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which has killed more than 11,000 people, has dropped out of the news as it has been brought under control. Although new cases are now...
View ArticleA dilemma of horns
Poaching rhinos is a grisly business. Rather than attract attention with gunfire, many poachers prefer to use a tranquilliser dart to immobilise the rhino and then hack off a chunk of its face to pull
View ArticleConcrete oasis
On the hot, empty road that leads from Las Vegas to the shocking beauty of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area sits Cactus Joe’s nursery. Cacti, yucca plants, ornamental rocks and various sorts
View ArticleHotter than August
“I AM convinced that no challenge poses a greater threat to our future, to future generations, than a changing climate,” declared Barack Obama on August 3rd. The president’s announcement of America’s...
View ArticleAt sea in the city
Many Chinese cities offer “sea views”, but of a kind that arouse fear and anger rather than raise spirits. The term is often used scornfully by Chinese media to describe the floods that render roads...
View ArticleBack to the nuclear zone
THE stench of rot and rat excrement fills the living room of Yoshiei Igari, one of thousands of residents who fled the town of Naraha on March 12th 2011 after an earthquake and tsunami had sent the nearby
View ArticlePaddy-whacked
NEARLY 16% of Indonesia’s 250m people survive on $1.90 a day or less, as do more than 6% of Cambodia’s 15m people. In both countries, rice is the staple crop, providing more than half the daily calories
View ArticleHope for the trees
Until the 1960s, forest-clearing accounted for most anthropogenic carbon emissions. Now it causes around 10%—a decline that led many at the UN climate summit in Paris to focus their efforts elsewhere.
View ArticleGreen light
“WE’VE shown what’s possible when the world stands as one,” declared Barack Obama after UN climate talks in Paris ended with an agreement on December 12th. “Our collective effort is worth more than the
View ArticleHopelessness and determination
“THE test of a first-rate intelligence”, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sometime Parisian, once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.” By this standard, the 195 countries
View ArticleGreen wash
WHEN it comes to corporate citizenship, Method’s ambitions are sky-high. The maker of environmentally-friendly cleaning products, which opened its first factory, in Chicago, in April, wants to be “the
View ArticleHalf-death
PENNSYLVANIA has played a big role in the history of American energy. Coal has been mined there since the 1760s (Pennsylvania is sometimes called “the coal state”). In 1859 Edwin Drake drilled a rickety
View ArticleHam-fisted handouts
A concrete track meanders past nurseries of pine saplings and sheep grazing on stubble, petering out at Dayinghan, the poorest, most remote village in the stony hills of central Shanxi, a northern...
View ArticlePower to the powerless
Imagine a country the size of India without power. No electric lights, mobile phones, radios crackling with cricket or televisions blaring Bollywood hits. Its economy would be medieval: tailors without
View ArticleBuzzing
THE toll of malaria is hard to comprehend. In Africa, parts of the Middle East, southern Asia and Melanesia, humans have been killed by the parasite, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, for thousands of
View ArticlePower hungry
For months a profound somnolence has settled over Hinkley Point C, where the government hopes to install an £18 billion ($26 billion) nuclear power plant. On a recent weekend the security guards were not
View ArticleHidden blight
Visitors to Japan rarely encounter the usual markers of privation. Housing is not run down. The urban homeless are out of sight, in makeshift tents in public parks or down by river banks. Japanese cherish
View ArticleUnholy woes
At the dawn of time Lord Vishnu made gods and demons join in churning the milky oceans to extract an elixir of eternal life. After cheating the demons of their share, Vishnu spilled four drops of the...
View ArticleA preventable tragedy
One of the mysteries of epidemiology is why Asia does not suffer from yellow fever. The disease is endemic in Africa, the continent where it evolved. It is widespread in South America, having been carried
View ArticleButts resist kicks
China has long been a smoker’s paradise: cigarettes are dirt-cheap and regulations so poorly enforced that even small children can buy them. The country is home to one in three smokers worldwide....
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