Christian Cummins

The descent into homelessness can be dizzyingly fast, explains social worker Susanne Peter, but the climb back out is painstakingly slow.

On 14 Oct., a Friday evening, there was not a single spare seat in the council chamber of the Austrian Parliament. But it wasn’t politicians. Instead-, the chamber was occupied by a very mixed public audience – ranging from elegantly coiffed society ladies to flat-capped young hipsters.

“Nothing really happens here anymore,” says Janez Fajfar with evident pride. Slovenia, the most successful European country to emerge from communism, is conspicuously absent from global headlines – and proud of it.

The 26th of April marked the 25th anniversary of the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the worst nuclear accident in history. Never has this commemoration seemed more relevant as, a quarter of a century later, a new generation is being confronted with the frightening pitfalls of the nuclear energy industry.

It was a few months ago, on a grey day dominated by the freezing Bora wind that I saw Croatia with its holiday make-up removed. The bus route down the Dalmatian coast never deviates far from the shoreline that is so loved by the yacht and sailing crowd.But it already felt like a different world.

I’m in Charleroi in Belgium, and I’m staring at a lost world. Along the banks of a canal that crosses the country from East to West, there is a huge abandoned industrial complex. You’ll see the rusted towers of a steel works, chimney, giant lifting hooks, the hap-hazard looking piles of buildings of an old coke works.

The huge scale of the disaster that has struck in Japan since the earthquake on Mar. 11 almost defies comprehension.

At an international tourism summit on Mar. 9 in Berlin, the Austrian Economics Minister Reinhold Mitterlehner admitted that the present complicated tobacco legislation, involving partitions and exemptions, had been a mistake.

“A general ban on smoking in gastronomy should have been passed.” he was quoted as saying in Styria’s Kleine Zeitung. “A complete solution is always better than a half solution,” he added, belatedly echoing the advice of medical advisors and anti-tobacco campaigners when the partial ban was passed.

Jeremy Rifkin is an energetic man with a big mission: to usher in the dawn of what he calls the “Third Industrial Revolution” – a new and more inclusive economy driven by clean energy.

Rifkin doesn’t think the business leaders and politicians who gathered in snowy Davos for the World Economic Forum in late January know how to bring the world out of crisis or, for that matter, how to tackle inequality.