Tens of thousands of people living near the plants have been evacuated or ordered to stay indoors, while radioactive materials have leaked in to the sea, soil and air. On Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggested widening the 30-km exclusion zone around the plant after finding that radiation levels at a village 40km from the plant exceeded the criteria for evacuation.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been dropping hints that he will leave his post in September should negotiations with Israel not resume by then, and should there be no agreement about the establishment of a Palestinian state. During a meeting in Ramallah with members of the Council for Peace and Security (who include former [...]

Women For Change, along with others, spent Wednesday night decorating umbrellas with messages of peace. The second annual Umbrellas for Peace was held by the organization in an effort to raise awareness for sexual abuse. The painted umbrellas will then be used in a march during the Take Back the Night event this coming Tuesday. [...]

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon urged Israel yesterday to refrain from provocative actions at a “crucial time” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as a September deadline set for a peace deal fast approaches. “The target dates for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on permanent status issues and completing the Palestinian Authority’s two-year state-building program are fast-approaching,” [...]

Obama’s speech showed a person more capable of DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink than Big Brother and the denizens of George Orwell’s 1984. How does a person as totally absurd as Obama expect to be taken seriously? What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and [...]

“Potentially catastrophic” impacts on food production from slow-onset climate changes are expected to increasingly hit the developing world in the future and action is needed now to prepare for those anticipated impacts, FAO warned today in a submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Currently the world is focused on dealing with [...]

The scope of active US and British involvement with the Libyan rebels came under close scrutiny last night as it emerged that western intelligence agents were on the ground in the country and that Barack Obama had signed a secret order authorising covert help. Obama signed an order, known as a “finding”, within the last [...]

Libya was not fated for an Arab Spring. As Aijaz Ahmad once put it, “every country gets the fascism it deserves.” In that spirit, every country gets the rebellion it deserves. Libya did not deliver the uplifting spactacles of Tunisia or Egypt. Its rebellion had a history that stretches back a hundred years, and one [...]

Head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI has taken an initiative to broker peace in Ivory Coast by sending top Ghanaian Catholic Church clergyman, Peter Cardinal Appiah Turkson to that country. The Pope told the Associated Press that he was sending the Cardinal to Ivory Coast, “to show my solidarity and that of the [...]

China said Thursday that its goals and tasks for national defense include safeguarding national sovereignty, maintaining social harmony and stability, promoting the modernization of national defense and keeping world peace. China’s national defense is tasked to guard against and resist aggression, defend the security of China’s lands, inland waters, territorial waters and airspace, safeguard its [...]