Good nutrition is the nexus point where food security, public health and environmental protection meet.  As world leaders in Copenhagen struggle for an ambitious deal, let us not forget that it is the future of our children that is at stake. Hurricanes, floods, heat-waves and droughts wreak havoc when they strike, but in the desolation they leave behind it’s relatively easy to reconstruct a road or a house. A human...

James Hansen, world’s leading climate change expert, says summit talks are so flawed that a deal would be a disaster.  The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week’s Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse. In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate...

The Anderson saga is one more reminder that the powerful can always count on official help.  In the fall of 2002, Greenpeace campaigner Casey Harell paid a surprise visit to the New York State private estate of Warren Anderson, and found him living a “life of luxury”. Nothing odd about the discovery except that in the eyes of the law Mr. Anderson was untraceable, and had been so since 1992...

It was to be a somber memorial, a remembrance of those who perished in a lethal milky fog. To mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster, authorities planned to open up the now-dilapidated shell of the Union Carbide fertilizer plant, where in the wee hours of December 3, 1984, 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas oozed out onto the sleeping city of Bhopal, India. About 4,000 people died instantly...

High levels of toxic chemicals are still found in Bhopal's drinking water, a new report published ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, said. Residents in the areas surveyed have high rates of birth defects, rapidly rising cancer rates, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness, it said. The report also questions the reliability of the tests carried out in at the AES Laboratories in New Delhi. The...