Afghanistan produces ninety percent of the world’s heroin. The illegal drug accounts for about half the country’s gross domestic product. The Canadian and U.S. governments, along with major media, say the Taliban controls this drug trade. The reality is quite different, as investigative journalist Reese Erlich reports from Jalalabad, near the Pakistan border.
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For those who speak and write non-Latin languages, being able to type on a ‘standard’ computer keyboard is a major barrier to digital democracy. In Cambodia, this problem has been solved and communities are now experimenting with wireless communication.
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They’re scrubby, fierce with mosquitoes and impossible to walk through, but salt water mangroves are the guardians of Earth’s tropical coastlines and nurseries for her fish. Coastal mangroves are endangered by unsustainable fishing and cutting practices. The mangroves of southern Cambodia, on the Gulf of Thailand, are a case in point.
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Thirty years have come and gone since the end of the American War – as the Vietnamese call it – and its toxic aftermath lingers on. Between 1961 and the early 1970s, the U.S. drenched Vietnam with almost a hundred million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides. It wasn’t just rainforests and mangroves that suffered … and the poison continues its dirty work.
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Once upon a time, the US was the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide, the major man-made, heat-trapping gas. The average American still emits more than the rest of us, but – sometime last year – fueled by a rising demand for coal and cement – China’s annual emissions surpassed the US’s, at about six billion tonnes. As the Chinese choke on fume-filled air, their leaders are turning to the wind.
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Mumbai … the world’s third most populous city. This little neck of land dangling in the Arabian Sea is a Mecca for India’s corporate giants. Real estate prices have skyrocketed. But almost half of Mumbai’s eighteen million residents are poor and the real estate crunch is squeezing them out. Nowhere is the clash between global real estate forces and traditional residents more evident than in Asia’s “largest slum”: Dharavi
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