Multinational oil companies have been extracting oil from the Niger Delta for the past 50 years. With the complicity of successive corrupt governments, they've collected enormous profits while local communities in the Delta have remained in extreme poverty.
Today's feature - excerpts of Curse of the Black Gold- is a collaboration between Talking Eyes Media and MediaStorm that looks into some of the consequences of decades of oil exploration in the Niger Delta.
On May 7, human rights defender Jaafar Kadhim was abducted and severely beaten by a group of men just west of Bahrain's capital city of Manama. Kadhim was left unconscious and, when he awoke, he was alone in his car and covered in blood. He managed to seek help and was taken to a local hospital, where he spent 11 days in treatment for severe injuries to the face and head, as well as two broken ribs. Watch:
Last week I wrote about Darfur Fast for Life - a growing movement of more than 400 people in 25 countries that have fasted (or are fasting) in solidarity with the people of Darfur, who are facing increasingly severe shortages of food, water, and medicine following the March 4 explusion of humanitarian aid organizations working in Sudan.
Your mobile phone, digital camera and other technology you may have (including the computer that you're reading this post on) is helping to fuel the ongoing crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), scene of the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have been killed and millions more have been displaced in the DRC since August 1998 - last year alone, 400,000 people lost their homes. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.
May 18 is National Day of Psychiatric Reform in Brazil, and activist and researcher Debora Diniz is hard at work advocating the issue. Debora, from Brasília, Brazil, is an activist and researcher at Anis: Institute of Bioethics, Human Rights and Gender.
On April 19, actress and activist Mia Farrow announced that she would begin a fast in solidarity with the people of Darfur. Here's Mia explaining her decision:
