Interviews with teachers at the forefront of international efforts to improve girls’ education reveal that many have taken on humanitarian roles, as well as working as educators, during the COVID-19 crisis. Their experiences are captured in a Government-commissioned report assessing UK-funded programmes for marginalised girls in some of the poorest parts of the world. It...
Regular citizens have taken the fight against illegal logging into their own hands in the pine-covered mountains of western Mexico, where loggers clear entire hillsides for avocado plantations that drain local water supplies and draw drug cartels hungry for extortion money. In some places, like the Indigenous township of Cheran in Michoacan state , the fight...
Landslides and flooding caused by heavy rains killed at least 19 people in Brazil’s most populous state Sunday while high waters forced some 500,000 families from their homes over the weekend, authorities said. Three people from the same family died when a landslide destroyed their house in the city of Embu das Artes, according to...
U.S. President Joe Biden said on Jan. 19, 2022, that he thinks Russia will invade Ukraine, and cautioned Russian president Vladimir Putin that he “will regret having done it,” following months of building tension. Russia has amassed an estimated 100,000 troops along its border with Ukraine over the past several months. In mid-January, Russia began...
In August 2021, the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan after fighting a war there for nearly 20 years. In addition to Afghanistan, the U.S. has reduced its military presence in several other conflict zones in recent years. It has lowered troop levels in Iraq from 170,000 in 2007 to 2,500 in 2021, and in Syria...
A new study shows that media coverage of crises can increase governments’ allocation of emergency humanitarian aid — whether or not the crisis merits it. This is because intense, national news coverage triggers other accountability institutions (the public, civil society, elected officials) who put pressure on governments to announce additional funding. Dr. Martin Scott (University of East...
We all know that the dinosaurs died in a mass extinction. But did you know that there were other mass extinctions? There are five most significant mass extinctions, known as the “big five,” where at least three-quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth faced extinction during a particular geological period of time....
The health outreach workers who drove past Lama Mballow’s village with a megaphone handed out T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “I GOT MY COVID-19 VACCINE!” By then, the women in Sare Gibel already had heard the rumors on social media: The vaccines could make your blood stop or cause you to miscarry. Women who took...
A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology “simply does not match-up”. The findings, published today in the peer-reviewed journal PaleoAmerica, are likely to have a major impact on how we understand Indigenous Americans’ arrival to the Western Hemisphere....
Coffee, that savior of the underslept, comes with enormous environmental and social costs, from the loss of forest habitats as woodlands are converted to crops, to the economic precarity of small-scale farmers whose livelihoods depend on the whims of international markets. Now, thanks to a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant of $979,720, Timothy Randhir, University of...
