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POPSSlavery Today During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery, he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner is most haunted by his experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.
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POPSMany of Scotland's seabirds are too hungry to lay eggs Most of the seabirds depend on sand eels - which used to shoal in vast numbers. Shetland fishermen have stopped catching them, but scientists believe climate change could be to blame for their continued decline, which is causing the birds to starve. Lower fish numbers lead to lower numbers of adult birds surviving from one year to the next, and not enough chicks being produced and surviving to replace them. Sea temperatures have risen by up to two degrees in the past 20 years and that may be causing the sand eels and the plankton on which they depend to move to cooler waters.
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POPSNature's problem-solving services endangered Economic growth beyond what contributes to human well being is wasteful of biodiversity, as well as resources. From a sustainable scale perspective, the rate at which new species evolve, relative to the current rate of extinction, determines whether the level of biodiversity is sustainable. After each of the previous mass extinctions, it took 5-10 million years for biodiversity to return to its previous level. A mass extinction caused by humans will have irreversible repercussions that will extend 2-3 times the period that humans have been on the earth.
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POPSa long French tradition of taking to the streets
More than a million French workers staged a general strike and marched in massive protests around the country Thursday to vent their anger over the global economic crisis and denounce President Nicolas Sarkozy's business-friendly approach to containing the damage. Without specific goals, the work stoppage and demonstrations were called mainly as a way for unionized workers and public servants to shout out their frustration about spreading layoffs and shrinking buying power and to complain that Sarkozy's $33 billion recovery program appears designed mainly to keep banks afloat and encourage businesses to invest. "This country is too unjust," said the Socialist Party leader, Martine Aubry, who hailed the marchers in Paris from the sidelines. Sarkozy, she said, "doesn't listen to anyone. He thinks he is right on everything." "These days, when someone has a strike, nobody notices," Sarkozy said infamously,7 months ago, angering workers and union leaders.
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