Famine News

Ghana's former President and African Union High Representative for Somalia, Flt Lt Jerry John Rawlings says though the United Nations has downgraded the famine situation in Somalia, the country was still at risk of a renewed crisis if humanitarian aid was cut.

Prolific British producer Jonathan Sothcott has announced plans for a new project that will be an adaptation of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, one of, if not the, most famous short story by Edgar Allen Poe.

A north Norfolk-based charity is urging people to save their spare change to help one of the world's most impoverished communities.

Three years ago, the acerbic Christopher Hitchens visited North Korea and returned to write for Slate about two "shattering facts" about "the ruined and starving country": First, then as now, satellite photography shows that the northern Korean peninsula is a black expanse each night, with none of the electricity that illuminates its neighbors.

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Wendy Rhymer was in South Sudan as a medical team leader with Doctors Beyond Borders.

Imagine if you were a child living in the Gebo and Bay regions of Somalia last summer. Instead of having the opportunity to go to school in the fall you were trapped in a massive drought zone.

Somalia has been a "collapsed state" since 1991. The instability that it harbors not only threatens the lives and livelihoods of its own people but endangers international security.

Four decades ago Norman Borlaug, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on raising crop yields worldwide , said: "I have only bought you a 40-year breathing space to stabilize your population." In 1970, when Borlaug got his prize for postponing the onset of famine for 40 years, the world's population was 3.7 billion.

Economics has been called "the dismal science" in substantial part because the book that British clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus wrote in 1798 was such a buzzkill.

FEW public figures in secular Australia can wangle the Pope and agriculture into the same speech, but Tim Fischer is a notable exception.

Amartya Sen, who retains his Indian citizenship, is the first Indian to be honored with the medal that is typically awarded to US nationals through its 16-year history.

Cold, dry February winds blowing through the bare trees can make a city seem haunted.

Rap star Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson visited Kenya and famine-hit Somalia this week to raise awareness on hunger and poverty issues.

As leaders and groups emerge throughout history, it is a universal precept that they are tested by trial and tragedy.

Alongside today's respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.

Another retelling of a classic Edgar Allan Poe tale is on its way and we have the first details and early sales art for you right here! Dig it! On the eve of the Berlin film market, prolific independent producer Jonathan Sothcott has announced ambitious plans for a post-apocalyptic, steampunk-styled adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror ... (more)

Despite the United Nation's recent declaration that the deadly Horn of Africa famine of 2011 has finally ended, it remains an obvious and inescapable certainty that the continent will soon confront another convergence of climatic, political and economic problems that produces a similar tragedy.

When you think of International Aid - what images come to mind? Food dumps in famine ridden Africa? Young Aussies teaching in remote Asian schools? Retirees building houses in the pacific islands? NT Department of Resources Entomologist Dr Brian Thistleton is off to the Solomon Islands as part of an AusAID funded project, to determine whether the ... (more)

It won't go into any of the assorted legal and sociological and creepy aspects of teachers having sex with students.

Rapper/actor/business mogul Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson visited war-torn Somalia this past Wednesday , eerily enough on the same day as Somalia's homegrown al Shabab terrorists joined forces with Al Qaeda .