Europe | Germany | Corruption

Germany’s Merkel calls for global emissions trading system

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Saturday for the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS), the bloc's flagship policy to cut greenhouse gas emissions, to become a global system. Thousands of power plants, factories and airlines in Europe have to surrender an allowance for every tonne of heat-trapping gas emitted. However, a surplus of allowances has depressed their price on the ETS and has made it cheaper to burn coal than to switch to greener fuels. "This instrument would of course be particularly effective if we could introduce it beyond Europe because then we'd have the s
Africa | Uganda | Environment

Women in Uganda Can’t Use Toilets Without Fear of Disease or Rape

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Mary Businge was in the doctor's seat, diagnosing a patient, when the municipal workers arrived. They were in a foul mood as they rolled up their sleeves and descended into a trench filled with sewage. The trench, stretching across the Nankulabye slum in Uganda's capital city Kampala, was where the slum's roughly 40,000 residents dropped their waste: discarded cans, torn shoes, playing cards, cigarette butts, documents, sanitary napkins, and bags containing feces. When it rained, the acrid water rose like a breathing thing, and so the city government sent their workers to empty the trench.
Asia | Thailand | Corruption

Thai environmentalists pay for activism with their lives

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Jintana Kaewkao, a 53-year-old activist, shop-owner and mother of three, arrived at the district government office on March 12 ready for a fight. With local tensions rising over the planned construction of a steel manufacturing plant amid the wetlands and coconut trees of this seaside community of Bangsaphan, Thailand, more than 30 villagers had assembled in the morning heat. Most were women; some had toddlers in tow. They were ready to register their concerns over potential pollution, and a local conglomerate’s questionable land acquisitions, with the district leader. As usual, they w
International | Culture

Patriarchy is killing our planet – women alone can save her

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The global epidemic of violence against women and their systematic exclusion from the power structures that rule us are integral to man's violent exploitation of Earth and her resources, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The fight to save the Earth must begin with the empowerment of women - and that means ending our complicity in their oppression, and servitude. The systemic marginalization and repression of women is not an accidental feature of our civilizational crisis. It is an integral and fundamental pillar of the pervasive injustice of the global system. The global epidemic of violence toward women
International | Crimes

14 Women Sailed to Sea to Investigate Plastic’s Toxic Impact on Hormones

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Last November, an all-woman team set out to sail the Atlantic, collecting samples of seawater and plastics as they went. They travelled from Lanzarote to Martinique over three weeks, some of them barely having stepped on a boat before. Their mission, which they named Exxp​edition, was to shine a light on several “unseens”: the unseen plastics and chemica​ls polluting the oceans; the unseen women vastly underrepresented in science and adventure; and the unseen research on women-specific diseases, which they feel has a low public profile. Some studies have shown that we have ove