TOKYO, Apr 9 2012 (IPS) – The discovery of radioactive contamination in ‘shiitake’ mushrooms grown in Manazuru town, Kanagawa prefecture, some 300 km away from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, has raised public clamour for compensation.
Soon after the discovery, on Apr. 5, Kanagawa authorities directed farmers and organisations dealing with agricultural produce not to ship shiitake mushrooms, a delicacy prized for its nutritive and medicinal properties in East Asian countries.
Some of the Manazuru mushroom samples were found to have over 141 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kg, while samples taken from Murata, Miyagi Prefecture, showed cesium levels as high as 350 becquerels.
The discovery comes as residents of areas surrounding the Fukush…
Father Edwin Gariguez is a Catholic priest from the Philippines. He currently serves as the Executive Secretary of the National Secretariat for Social Action, the advocacy and social development arm of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. He was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2012 for leading a grassroots movement against an illegal mining project to protect Mindoro Island’s biodiversity and its indigenous people.
Candlelight vigil co-organised by 350.org, the global grassroots climate movement, held just before the Pope’s visit to the Philippines in January this year. Photo credit: LJ Pasion
MANILA, Jun …
Credit: Anne Holmes/IPS
Mombasa, Kenya, Apr 7 2016 (IPS) – There is a ‘Little Boy’ who has nothing to do with the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. This time it is about another ‘Little Boy’ who has been devastating the harvests in many regions, especially in Africa.
This ‘Little Boy’ (from El Niño in Spanish) is a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific including the coasts of South America. In Latin America the term El Niño refers to the Child Jesus, so named because the pool of warm water in the Pacific near South America is often at its …
Why Governments Must Prioritise Sustained Tobacco Control Investment in Low- & Middle-Income Nations
Ryan Forrest is Policy and Research Advisor; Sara Rose Taylor, PhD is Research Officer; Mafoya Dossoumon is Communications Manager;
Credit: WHO/2017
OTTAWA, Sep 2 2019 (IPS) – Trends in global consumption of cigarettes haven’t improved since the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) came into force, according to a published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) earlier this summer.
Perhaps this is because the FCTC on its own is not a magic bullet. Governments have paid the issue of tobacco-use a lot of lip service but they have invested very little to match the global burden of the epidemic.
Simply agreeing on what …
NEW YORK, Aug 12 2022 (IPS) – Today marks , a global celebration of the transformative power of young people. Introduced by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, the event was inaugurated not only to observe the power of the youth voice, but to serve as a promise from those in power to activate the power of youth across the development sector.
Yasmine Sherif
Since then, the United Nations appointed a Youth Envoy, dedicated to the diffusion of the day’s promise, and many aid organizations have followed suit by including the voices of young people in social media campaigns, high-level events, and stakeholder forums.
In 2021, Education Cannot Wait (), t…