News stories by Matthew O. Berger, page 6

While drug use has largely stabilised in industrial countries, there are signs that it may be on the rise in developing countries, says a new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and the impact of a rise in drug abuse could cause a lot more damage in developing countries than it has for their richer counterparts.

Despite the pleas of some conservative politicians that parallels should not be drawn between the oil spreading over the Gulf of Mexico and the need to transition out of a reliance on fossil fuels, U.S. President Barack Obama made it clear Tuesday night that he sees the race against the spreading oil as inherently connected to the race against a changing climate.

On a spring day in the Gulf of Mexico, a pipe issuing from the sea floor ruptured, sending an explosion rippling up to the drilling platform above and spewing oil into the surrounding waters. Experts scrambled to seal off the ever-increasing mass of oil by capping the pipe, clogging it or covering it. Nothing worked.

Ten years ago, the U.S. State Department issued its first annual review of governments' efforts to combat human trafficking. Monday, the report included the U.S.'s own struggles with the problem for the first time.

Men, women, NGOs, governments, the Gates Foundation. Everyone agrees — women are awesome. More importantly, protecting the health of the people that make up more than half of the human population and do far more than half of the work to sustain it should be everyone's priority.

With their population at less than 20 percent of what it was four decades ago, bluefin tuna in the western Atlantic need a lot of things to go just right if they are going to survive as a population. Now, just as they are returning to the Gulf of Mexico to spawn, they are likely to find one of their key breeding grounds slicked-over with oil.

An agreement reached at an international conference last week pledged over four billion dollars to the U.N.'s effort to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that come from deforestation and forest degradation. But a study published Friday questions what impact that effort, called REDD, can have.

The resources society derives from nature have been horribly mismanaged and this will lead to the children of the world's poorest people remaining in poverty, according to Paul Collier. The easiest of these resources to regulate is fish, but we have not even managed to get that right, he said.

It may seem odd that an outright ban on whaling would not be the most effective way to prevent the controversial practice, but that is exactly what the International Whaling Commission is betting on.

Along with an expanded focus on domestic prevention and treatment, the U.S. will make a renewed effort to disrupt the flow of narcotics into its borders and weapons and money out of them, according to the White House's long-anticipated National Drug Control Strategy released Tuesday.