The United Kingdom will fall behind the rest of the world in developing one of the key technologies in the fight against climate change because of "incoherence and timidity" by the government, according to a leading expert.
Tuberculosis is back, complete with new and deadlier strains that kill 2 million people a year worldwide, but these days it's non-profit groups rather than big pharmaceutical companies that are leading the fight against it.
The recent images taken of one of the world's last uncontacted tribal peoples have restarted the debate of many decades about how such groups should be protected from being forced off their land and diseases to which they have no resistance.
Desmond Tutu's conclusion that "silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all" after investigating Palestinian deaths caused by the Israeli military was all the more powerful by having been spoken by an anti-apartheid leader.
In north Belfast, loyalist paramilitaries were once vigilantes fighting the IRA, but they have survived as criminal organisations involved in extortion, drugs and robbery, and their community continues to pay a bitter price.
A secret deal being negotiated by the Bush administration would see the US military occupying permanent bases and controlling Iraqi airspace with legal immunity for all soldiers and contractors, regardless of the outcome of the presidential election.
All through his career, first as a war hero and then in the Capitol, John McCain has been a maverick, but as the presidential race hots up, the Republican candidate is befriending the religious right, gun lobby and others he once despised and ridiculed.
It is appropriate that participants at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation summit will concentrate on the effect of soaring food prices on the developing world, which brings the world perilously close to witnessing an epidemic of hunger.
Despite publicly supporting emissions reductions, the coal industry and electricity firms have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to kill a proposed law that would introduce "cap-and-trade" rules on carbon emissions.
Having remarked that this century's greatest crime had become normalised enough for somone who has breached the Nuremberg Principles on war crimes to visit book festivals, I proposed attempting a citizens' arrest of John Bolton, writes George Monbiot.
