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While corn-based biofuel, particularly corn-based ethanol, has been touted to be the most viable alternative to petroleum and other fossil fuels, the production of such grain-based alternative has sparked many a debate as to its supposed environmental sustainability. Food crop displacement is just one of the trade-offs in the burgeoning ethanol industry. Nowhere [...]

Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society is a lesson for humans, culled from studies on primate behavior. The fascinating lessons push the boundaries between man and animal. The book is also a plea for the use in human society of the concept of ‘living together.’ Frans de Waal, a multi-awarded primatologist and [...]

Facebook, the world leader in social networking sites, won a major patent for the news distribution services in social networks known as ‘feed.’ The award is described as “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” With this new patent that was first requested in 2006, Facebook can now run after other social networks [...]

Over 130 countries have agreed to the Nusa Dua Declaration on the environment, a proclamation that covers the major issues of green economies, biodiversity, and international environmental management. The monumental mandate of the declaration is to underscore the importance of preserving biodiversity and the need to adopt a low-carbon green economy [...]

Much mystery remains to shroud the assassination of Hamas man Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. al-Mabhouh was a senior Hamas military commander and one of the founders of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Palestinian socio-political organization Hamas. Much controversy surrounds the death. After all, here is an Arab fundamentalist [...]

According to data, only 5% of the world’s population or some 154 million people benefit from anti-smoking laws. Additionally, statistics show that passive smoking is responsible for about 600,000 deaths a year. The anti-tobacco lobby is a lost battle especially in developing countries and emerging economies where smoke-free laws are not strictly implemented, [...]

Iran is willing to grant Japan the contract for the construction of five new nuclear plants, according to Iranian Parliamentary Foreign Policy and National Security Committee Chairman Alaeddin Boroujerdi. He adds that ‘Japan’s participation would be in the interest of both the Government of Japan and private companies.’ Japan is being allowed [...]

A report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), entitled Recycling – From E-waste to Resources, discloses the amount of e-waste being generated in 11 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The data on current estimates are also used to project future e-waste e-waste is just a euphemism for waste materials coming from products of [...]

On February 18, the United Nations had the largest fund-raising in its history, garnering $1.44 billion for emergency aid to Haiti in 2010. However, there has been a lot of criticism regarding the failure of coordination of such a humanitarian aid among the UN agencies and NGO recipients of these funds. Huge humanitarian needs remain unmet in spite [...]

Stacy Webber in David Horowitz’s NEWSREAL sums up the sentiments of climate change skeptics, and calls Global Warming aka Climate Change a junk science and that ‘if it were a monster, it would be Dracula.’ The victim, of course, is western society that is ready and primed to gobble up the alarmist propaganda. Thanks to the power of nightmares [...]