Article Source: CS Monitor-Africa Monitor

For the younger, more urbanized generation in Africa, film may be the dominant artistic medium, but for the continent's older generations, music remains central to identity.

Is film now Africa’s dominant form of artistic expression? The Economist asserted this proposition in an otherwise reliable article on Nollywood, the Nigerian video industry. “Film is now Africa’s dominant medium, replacing music and dance,” The Economist writes. Can this be so? Perhaps for people under 20 years old, a new generation of more urbanized Africans who comprise as much as 45 percent of the population of many countries south of the Sahara. For these African youth, the village can seem remote, making dance a forgotten art. Music, meanwhile, is adulterated, a melange of hip-hop, rock, reggae and other “imported” styles.

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Article Source: CS Monitor

In many ways, 2010 is a year you may want to relegate to the filing cabinet quickly. It began with a massive earthquake in Haiti and wound down with North Korea once again being an enfant terrible – bizarrely trying to conduct diplomacy through brinkmanship.

In between came Toyota recalls and egg scares, pat downs at airports and unyielding unemployment numbers, too little money in the Irish treasury and too many bedbugs in American sheets. Oil gushed from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for three months, mocking the best intentions of man and technology to stop it, while ash from a volcano in Iceland darkened Europe temporarily as much as its balance sheets.

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Article Source: USA Today

Shamila Kohestani lost five years of formal education, from ages 8 to 13, while living in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Instead, she secretly defied the fundamentalist regime as her older sisters tutored her at home in math, biology and chemistry.

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Article Source: InterPress Service

CANCÚN, Mexico, Dec 5 (IPS) – Global agriculture contributes in the region of 17 percent to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, but according to the World Bank, climate smart agriculture techniques can both reduce emissions and meet the challenge of producing enough food for a growing world population. “As much as agriculture is part of the problem, it is also part of the solution,” said Inger Anderson, the World Bank’s vice president on sustainable development. Agriculture experts are punting a scenario in which farming delivers a “triple win”, sequestering carbon in soil and biomass, gaining greater resilience to drought and higher temperatures, and improve food security and farmers’ incomes.

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