Om Prakash Gurjar wins Children’s Peace Prize 
He used to work as a bonded labourer in the fields of Rajasthan to repay his grandfather’s debt. One fine day, things changed dramatically for Om Prakash Gurjar after Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) activists rescued him from bonded labour and gave him a new lease of life at Bal [...]

[Read more →]

“Awe is not usually a condition our buildings inspire.” Rem Koolhaas
Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.
Being [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday, 22th. November, The Netherlands turned voting. Although the Christian-Democrats (CDA) turned out to be (again) the largest party,  the big (remarkable) winners were extreme left (the Socialist party) and extreme right (Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, which is a hardliner in the immigration debate), both at the cost of the Labour Party (PvdA) and [...]

[Read more →]

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in the Human Development Report 2006 report released on November 9, 2006, has said that lack of water is caused by lack of power, rather than by limited resources. “The scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and equality, not in [...]

[Read more →]

Next time you’re feeling a bit annoyed by your teenager’s obsession with MySpace, consider this: She and 72 million of her close friends may be shaping the future of business.
That may sound like an overblown description of the role MySpace, YouTube, flickr and del.icio.us play in the ever-evolving world of the Web, but there’s ample [...]

[Read more →]

“Fusion always causes a lot of media hype because people really want it to happen”
(New Scientist) It sounded too good to be true - and it was. When the Chinese news agency Xinhua announced on 29 September that researchers had initiated thermonuclear fusion in a brand-new reactor, news organisations worldwide ran with the story. “During [...]

[Read more →]

Just over two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of the modern Middle East — some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War — the American era in the Middle East, [...]

[Read more →]

Governments often speak of ‘poverty’ or ‘deprivation’ as among the root causes of terrorism. There is much rhetoric about addressing basic issues, which, it is believed, create fertile terrain for fundamentalists and extremists.
There is a problem for governments in their promises to address poverty and exclusion in their countries, for global market-distributed rewards which make [...]

[Read more →]

(BusinessWeek) A new book—an outgrowth of a popular Web site—focuses on simple and complex innovations that could solve global crises
The three-year-old Web site Worldchanging.com has quickly established itself as a source for original, sophisticated reporting on green technology and humanitarian tools and organizational models, among other altruistic topics. The editors’ focus is on how people [...]

[Read more →]

After having been overhyped over and over again,(see a.o. the articles in Banking Review) microcredit suddenly seems to get a hard time to endure, following a devastating article in the Wall Street Journal. (published on GlobalInfo in Dutch quoting the NRC Handelsblad). It stated that the a Nobel Prize for Economy would have been better [...]

[Read more →]