A public opinion survey released earlier this month shows that 67 per cent of Alaskans think gay couples deserve some form of legal recognition. So, in a meeting of the Alaska House Majority Caucus February 15, Mark Miller, a reporter for the Juneau Empire newspaper, asked, “would the caucus support the idea of having domestic […] More »

It’s two and a half days since the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. The Adventist Hospital, an enormous white building in a formerly leafy suburb of Port-au-Prince, now looks more like a war zone. Thousands of people are camped around the hospital in need of urgent medical care—mangled limbs, bleeding head […] More »

A new law will impair Canadian development investments in Cambodia and tighten its government’s grip on civil society. More than two months have passed since the Cambodian government released the second draft of the controversial Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations (known colloquially as the NGO law),and the country’s civil society organizations are still holding […] More »

When Ethiopia asked the world for food aid last October, former subsistence farmer Terefi Tekale was not among the 6.2 million people desperate for help. Though his family’s long-held plot in Ethiopia’s Konso region has done poorly in recent years—the soil is sterile, his corn stunted and his hillside eroded—an ambitious new development plan means […] More »

With today’s edition of Verbatim, we’ve got This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey in conversation with Liberal Party critic for International Cooperation Glen Pearson. You can hear the original podcast of this conversation, as always, on the podcast blog. Nick and Glen discuss Canada’s humanitarian commitments past, present, and future, ranging from Darfur to Afghanistan […] More »

[Editor’s Note: Siena Anstis, who has served as our Africa correspondent on the blog over the past few months, is moving on to new projects. She’ll continue to contribute to the blog, but wanted to pass on some of the things she’s learned during her time working and reporting in Uganda, Kenya, and elsewhere for […] More »