April 26, 2018 – Bridge Agents

Rosalind Franklin still doesn’t get the recognition she deserves for her DNA discovery

April 26, 2018 Bridge Agents

(Conversation) – Visiting the Institut Curie in Paris recently got me thinking about the distinct lack of famous female Nobel Prize winners in science (Marie Curie excepted). The world rightly celebrated the incredible life and achievements of Stephen Hawking when he died last month. Yet the recent 60th anniversary of another brilliant scientist who also didn’t win a Nobel Prize but who happened to be a woman passed pretty much unnoticed. Rosalind Franklin died on April 16th 1958 at the tender age of 37, but packed at least two lifetime’s…

UN High Commissioner Calls on World Bank to ‘Marry’ Rights and Development

April 26, 2018 Bridge Agents

(HRW) – Last week the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein reminded a room of World Bank economists that human rights are “also your job,” and called on the institution to “marry human rights and economics.” That call, at a World Bank event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, echoes criticism by Human Rights Watch and numerous other civil society organizations that the World Bank needs to do a better job of making human rights central to its mission…

Canary in the Coal Pond

April 26, 2018 Bridge Agents

United States (ProPublica) – In tests conducted in late 2017, one in three coal-fired power plants nationwide detected “statistically significant” amounts of contaminants, including harmful chemicals like arsenic, in the groundwater around their facilities. This information, which utility companies had to post on their websites in March, became public for the first time under an Obama-era environmental rule regulating coal ash, the waste generated from burning coal. Mixed with water and stored in ponds and landfills at nearly 300 facilities across the country, coal ash has been found to contain carcinogens…