Reports

Energy giant Shell's new Brazilian joint-venture partner is producing biofuels from land taken from an impoverished Indian tribe. Last month, Shell signed a $12 billion deal to produce biofuels from sugar cane with Brazilian biofuels giant Cosan. But some of Cosan’s sugar cane is grown on land officially recognised as belonging to Guarani Indians. A Brazilian prosecutor with constitutional powers to defend indigenous rights in court, has written to Shell warning that its involvement in the joint...

African-American seniors are twice as likely to be mistreated than elders of other races. They are five times more susceptible to being swindled, the first population-based survey on the psychological abuse of senior citizens in the US has found. Reporting the survey results in The Gerontologist journal, University of Pittsburgh researchers have called for health care and social service workers to be especially vigilant for the possible mistreatment of African American seniors. The survey is...

Directly challenging extremist ideology through exposing the fallacies, contradictions and harmful effects of jihadist concepts and actions is a better way of tackling them than closing down extremist websites, a think-tank has concurred. Quilliam, a London-based think-tank whose founders are former ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organisations, has based its conclusions on an 18-month study of Arabic-language websites that eventually focused on 20 discussion forums. Unlike earlier...

Not only do journalists worldwide accept bribes but often reporters and editors are the instigators, extorting either for publishing favourable stories or for not publishing damaging ones, a new report states. A report Cash for Coverage: Bribery of Journalists Around the World by the Washington DC-based Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) calls it "a single problem with many faces." In South Africa, a journalist admitted in an affidavit that he and several others had set up a media...

The British Library in London has posted more than a quarter of its Greek manuscripts, equating to more than 280 volumes, online, the latest step toward digitising important ancient documents. The manuscripts, available for free on its website at www.bl.uk/manuscripts, are part of one of the most important collections outside Greece for the study of more than 2,000 years of Hellenic culture. The website provides researchers with access to high quality digital images of a major part of the...

An international group of researchers, journalists and diplomats will study the impact of America’s first African American President. They will analyse the challenges facing the President and the significance of his policies. The AHRC Obama Research Network will also organise symposia and seminars and stage an international conference just after the next presidential election in 2012, and publish the results on a dedicated website. The events will take place at the universities of Edge Hill...

Palestinian and Israeli children not only suffer the direct physical consequences of violence, they are also being psychologically scarred by the high levels of violence they witness. Researchers from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) have found that nearly 50 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 11 and 14 have seen other Palestinians upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Israelis. Nearly the same proportion reported...

If your general knowledge is better than average, you will wonder how someone could do this. But yes, the cash-rich Union Ministry of Tourism has released a stamp with an African elephant on it. This laudable initiative was taken on the occasion of World Tourism Day on Monday, September 27. This year the theme is 'tourism and biodiversity'. So the ministry, led by the exuberant Selja, tried to do its bit — by putting an African elephant on a stamp. The tourism ministry released as many as 18...

One in five gay and bisexual men in the United States is infected with HIV and almost half of those infected are unaware of their status, the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found. Each year about 56,300 Americans become infected with HIV and about 18,000 die from AIDS. The CDC findings fall close to the third National Gay Men's HIV/AIDS Awareness Day being observed in the US on Monday. Nineteen percent of "men who have sex with men" are HIV positive and 44 percent of...

People in OECD countries are becoming fatter by the day. One in two people is now overweight or obese in almost half of OECD countries. Rates are projected to increase further and in some countries two out of three people will be obese within ten years. The findings are from a new report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which examines the current obesity epidemic, giving new comparative data, trends and projections across OECD countries and outlining causes and...