The mercenaries who brought you Blackwater are now bringing their particular brand of executive solutions to protests in the Middle East. More in this New York Times story, which contains lines like this: “Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims. “
Finally, some robust data on the link between climate change and food prices. Abstract below, full article in Science. Keep Reading »
Wal-Mart aims to be the go-to vendor for your organic needs but, in Vermont at least, you’re better off at a farmers’ market, according to this study.
A new report, showcasing P. Sainath’s excellent work on India’s rural holocaust, published by the New York University Law School, is available here.
More at The Hindu. Hat tip: Xavier Dias.
Fred Kaufman has been busy, not only with a fine summary in the latest issue of Foreign Policy of last year’s analysis of Goldman Sachs’ hunger games, but also at TedxManhattan, where he gave this fine talk on the lunacy of a retail sustainability index.
Also at Ted, Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group gave a helpfully concise summary of how the Farm Bill works.
Finally – and not before time – Antipodean food activist extraordinaire Christine Dann has started a blog, The Dead End Diet, which joins the blogroll.
Reposted from The Guardian.
What does it take to make the food speculators at Goldman Sachs look like they’re playing for lunch money? A secretive Swiss-based company, and one of the world’s largest commodity trading firms, knows. With its initial public offering announced on Thursday, Glencore – a multibillion-dollar mining, energy and food trader that will soon list in London and Hong Kong – is the envy of Wall Street. When Goldman Sachs was floated, the then CEO Hank Paulson made off with $219m. Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, has already earned the moniker “The Ten Billion Dollar Man” for his share of the bonanza.
Here’s a piece I wrote for Foreign Policy, updated with Tuesday’s news about revised population estimates for the rest of the century. Keep Reading »
The Royal Wedding is over, and Britain can go back to its routine celebrity obsessions and police excesses. I’ll be raising a glass to Ian Bone, whose hit “Better Dead than Wed” dates from the last royal wedding, of which I was reminded by Red Pepper magazine. Best lines:
Nuclear Bulletin #22
27 iv 2011
The Word is Bail.
A summation of events since Bulletin 21 is in order: Japan has extended the evacuation zone and imposed tough measures against violators, prompting tensions with evacuees who assumed such removal would be temporary. Japan upgraded the catastrophe to Category 7, the same as Chernobyl, while credibly reporting that the total amount of material released was about one tenth the radioactivity released at Chernobyl. Given the much greater concentration of releases in nearby territory in Japan, this highlights my prior point that the long-range fallout effects of Fukushima will be minuscule compared to Chernobyl. Correspondingly, the on-site and near-site effects will be of similar magnitude, and numerous reports of radiation sickness among the workforce are beginning to appear.
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