Author: Fono

Cruelty Free Shopping Made Easy

- Fono

Happy New Year! To celebrate 2010, I got you a website that makes it easy to find out which cosmetic / toiletry / household good companies don’t test their products on animals.

Here’s the site, and here’s why:

In cosmetics and household products research, painful experiments are carried out on hundreds of thousands of animals every year in the UK, including dogs, rabbits, pigs, mice, rats, guinea-pigs, fish and birds. This includes tests for skin or eye irritation, skin sensitisation (allergy), toxicity (poisoning), mutagenicity (genetic damage), teratogencity (birth defects), carcinogenicity (causing cancer), embryonic or fetal genetic damage and toxicokinetics (to study the absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of the substance).

Every year is a good year for ethical consumerism!

How CoP-15 Changed the World

- Fono

Depressed about the Copenhagen Accord? While the action on climate change may have been less than you were hoping for, Worldchanging.com has an article explaining how the conference signaled a different kind of sea change. According to Alan Akisson, this was the first major event where developing nations had voices as loud as the developed, in a truly democratic process.

The Earthquake in Copenhagen truly marked the end of one historical era, and the beginning of a new one. It is an era of more democratic global governance (at least in the sense of how power, actual and perceived, is dispersed among nations). An era of continuous struggle to understand what is happening to our planet, and continuous effort to share that understanding. An era of nations being forced to collaborate, more and more closely, and over several decades, on planetary management. In the hindsight of future history (especially environmental history), CoP-15 will likely loom large indeed as an inflection point, a time when everything changed — or rather, was finally seen by all as changed.

Read the whole article

Mobile Tech Makes Donating Insanely Easy

- Fono 3 Comments

It’s the giving time of year, and MobHappy has a short writeup on new technology that allows people to donate to charities, simply by sending a text. This is a great advancement, because it shortens the gap between intention and action where a lot of charitable dollars are lost.

Today, mGive works with over 200 charities, enabling mobile users to donate money quickly and easily via shortcode. And it’s been successful: one campaign, featuring Alicia Keys and conducted during the American Idol TV show saw 90,000 donors raise $450,000 in just minutes. Donors have given about $1.5 million via mobile so far in the US; this exceeds the first year of online donations, and those now amount to some $18 billion per year.

Unfortunately the service is currently only available to our US friends.

Read the rest of the article

Uganda Bans Female Circumcision

- Fono

From the BBC:

Ugandan MPs have voted to outlaw female genital mutilation – also known as female circumcision.

Anyone convicted of the practice, which involves cutting off a girl’s clitoris, will face 10 years in jail, or a life sentence if a victim dies.

The BBC’s Joshua Mmali in Uganda says it is not officially condoned but is still practised in several rural areas.

Read the complete article

56 Newspapers in 45 Countries and 20 Languages

- Fono

Just one last post about Copenhagen (probably.) Yesterday, 56 newspapers in 45 countries and 20 languages published a shared editorial, urging the citizens and policymakers of the world to take Copenhagen as a serious call-to-action. If they can work together, maybe the rest of us can?

Given that newspapers are inherently rivalrous, proud and disputatious, viewing the world through very different national and political prisms, the prospect of getting a sizeable cross-section of them to sign up to a single text on such a momentous and divisive issue seemed like a long shot. But an early, enthusiastic, conversation with the editor of one of India’s biggest dailies offered encouragement. Then in Beijing in September, I met a senior editor from an influential business weekly, the Economic Observer.

Notwithstanding the shifting boundaries of press freedom in China, he was sure his paper would participate (and another major Chinese daily would subsequently, too). If we could reach a common position with papers from the two developing world giants most commonly identified as obstacles to a global deal, then surely we could crack the rest.

Read the editorial here (The Guardian)

Read the behind-the-scenes story here (The Guardian)

Scroll To Top