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admin /19 April, 2009
In a distinct departure from the official US stance under George W Bush, the Environment Protection Authority in that country has named carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases as pollutants which can damage public health and welfare. In 2007, the US was subject to a major advertising campaign that equated Carbon Dioxide with green plants and an outdoor lifestyle under the slogan, “You call it carbon dioxide, we call it life.” Those major lobbying efforts have now been directed into government funding for clean coal, a technology that the coal industry itself dismissed as recently as two years ago as “ludicrously expensive and practically impossible.”
admin /19 April, 2009
The Union of Concerned Scientists said that there has been almost no improvement in agricultural productivity after a decade and a half of planting genetically modified crops. A report released by the scientists last week showed that the yields on US corn farms have increased by 28 percent over the last five years, but this is almost all as a result of traditional breeding and other farm practices. “A hard-nosed assessment of this expensive technology’s achievements to date gives little confidence that it will play a major role in helping the world feed itself in the forseeable future,” said the report.
admin /19 April, 2009
The German Agriculture minister, Ilse Aigner has banned the sale or planting of Monsanto’s MON810 corn on the basis that it is dangerous for the environment.
The corn produces a Bt toxin that kills insects which try to eat it. Questions have been raised about the persistence of the toxin in the environment. France and Germany have both questioned the safety of the corn a number of times despite approval by the European Union. Monsanto is expected to mount a court case to recoup damages of up to $US10million which it will claim as lost revenue.
Austria previously banned the corn on grounds of health concerns but was overruled by the European Food Safety Authority.
admin /19 April, 2009
Waves pounding against the sandbagged seawall in Kivalina, Alaska. In 2006, a recently completed $2.5m sea barrier was partly destroyed. The community was evacuated in 2007. Photograph: Mary Sage/AP
The Inuit Circumpolar conference to be held in Alaska next week will involve indegenous communities around the world in a discussion about protecting their populations from climate chaos. 200 Alaskan communities are dotted on the Arctic coast and five of them have already decided that their communities will have to move as a result of climate change. Most famously, the community of Kivalinawas moved in 2007 after a $US2.5 million sea barrier was destroyed by a wild storm. Most of this coast has been previously protected from ocean storms by sea ice. That ice has now melted exposing the coast and its inhabitants.
admin /19 April, 2009
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| Iranian women at a pollling station. Photo: AP |
The Middle East’s decades-long population boom is coming to an end, according to new United Nations data. In fact, eight of the 15 countries that witnessed the greatest decrease in fertility since 1980 are Middle Eastern, led by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Iran, the average number of children per woman decreased from 6.50 between 1975 and 1980, to a projected fewer than two from 2005 to 2010.
The other countries that made the list in the region are Tunisia, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco.
admin /18 April, 2009
From Common Dreams
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
