Warning – this post may offend many. The situation I am about to address is a firebrand that causes high emotion for many people. I am not seeking to make any friends with this, I have just decided that for the first time, I wish to air publicly, some of my privately held opinions on this matter and I believe it entirely relates to the point of this site. I cannot, in good conscience, remain [...]

There is an irony in the image I’ve used for this article. Here I was thinking I was a serious blogger… clearly not. When they go away on holiday, people operating serious internet sites cue up material and date stamp it to publish on the days they are not around and they remain committed to things they have stated they would be part of during that time. I didn’t do that and while I was [...]

When discussing Fair Trade and the use of co-operatives as a healthy business model in developing areas, I often get asked what a co-operative (co-op) is. Allow me to give an explanation here for people who may not have grasped an understanding of this business model before, and allow to me to share why I think it is a strong model for developing areas.

Many of us have grown up hearing stories about the holocaust through school, television, film, books and museum trips. There is a sense where sometimes it feels too familiar; that the horror of the event is just another of those tales we hear of the past and thus the horror of the catastrophe of the second world war loses it’s human face – a face of darkness and suffering. Shoah is a 9 hour catalogue [...]

WITH the meltdown of international banking and credit filling investors with dread, developed nations are using the crisis to legitimise backing away from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), said TEAR Fund Executive Director Stephen Tollestrup. The MDGs signed by 189 nations promised to halve poverty for the poorest of our planet’s people by 2015 and increase aid to 0.7 per cent of their countries GDPs. “The truth is”, says, Mr Tollestrup, “the MDGs go well [...]

Ok, so maybe the title takes it a bit far, but I have no doubt that a good argument can be formed to show that Open Source is the ethical and more than suitable choice for any computer user in this day and age. Last night, after flirting with the idea of shifting my computer operating system to an open source Linux system for years, I finally made the leap last night, wiping Microsoft Windows [...]