International Glance
Few would argue that the United Nations Security Council, which has long been dominated by five powers including the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia, would not benefit from some degree of democratic reform.
Indeed, it can hardly be said that the United Nations, which was originally set up in 1945, truly reflects a more diverse 21st century world. Though ten other nations besides the big five currently serve on the council, they only stay for two years and are relegated to inferior "non-permanent" member status.
WikiLeaks: Great power rivalry at the UN
Israeli troops mysteriously get cancer
High occurrence of cancer has been detected in Israel's elite naval commando unit, apparently due to the waste disposal by Israeli firms in Kishon River.
The river, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea in the northern city of Haifa, has been used for training the unit, known as Shayetet 13.
Carmel Olefins Ltd., Israel's sole manufacturer of petrochemical products used in the plastics industry, as well as other firms have been accused of directing their waste into the river, which is notorious for being the most polluted stream in Israel.
UN Chief: Israel occupation 'morally and politically unsustainable, must end'
The UN secretary general called on Israel Wednesday to halt settlement building in occupied territory, and put a stop to all forms of violence and incitement, the UN News Center reported.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke at the UN Latin American and Caribbean Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, convened by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People that opened in Uruguay Wednesday. According to the report, Ban saying said it was a "crucial time" for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Pakistan's secret dirty war
The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen.
Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.
This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.
China 'to overtake US on science' in two years
China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 - far earlier than expected. That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK's national science academy.
The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. An analysis of published research - one of the key measures of scientific effort - reveals an "especially striking" rise by Chinese science.
MOX plutonium fuel used in Fukushima's Unit 3 reactor two million times more deadly than enriched uranium
Largely absent from most mainstream media reports on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is the fact that a highly-dangerous "mixed-oxide" (MOX) fuel in present in six percent of the fuel rods at the plant's Unit 3 reactor. Why is MOX a big deal? According to the Nuclear Information Resource Center (NIRS), this plutonium-uranium fuel mixture is far more dangerous than typical enriched uranium -- a single milligram (mg) of MOX is as deadly as 2,000,000 mg of normal enriched uranium.
High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japan Plant
Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country’s stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said.
The development came as the authorities reached for ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in the spent rods of the No. 3 reactor.
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