The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen The Costs of Green Dreams The environmental and economic costs of Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear reactors are growing. Wealth of nations India’s Hindu temples have huge stores of gold sitting idle outside the banking system. Don't Cry to Me Argentina The President tells her people (and the web): “Everything has to do with everything.” Culture Wars Chinese scientists are facing a big backlash for an unethical experiment that edited the DNA of embryos—a historical first. Putin's Prospects Russian workers who have gone without pay due to the economic troubles are protesting at the national scale. The Afterparty Rages On Libya’s failure becomes a campaign issue in the UK.
Why genetically engineered food is dangerous: New report by genetic engineers Earth Open Source press release 17 June 2012 Aren’t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn’t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other? A new report released today, “GMO Myths and Truths”,[1] challenges these claims. The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms (GMOs). Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners but from two genetic engineers who believe there are good scientific reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops. One of the report’s authors, Dr Michael Antoniou of King’s College London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed. Notes Key points from the report
Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions - Comment - Voices And there you have it. Our dead men didn't matter in the slightest to him. And he had a point, didn't he? For we are outraged today, not by the massacre of the innocents, but because the hostages killed by the Algerian army - along with some of their captors - were largely white, blue-eyed chaps rather than darker, brown-eyed chaps. If all those slaughtered in the Algerian helicopter bombing had been Algerian, we would have mentioned the "tragic consequences" of the raid, but our headlines would have dwelt on the courage and efficiency of Algeria's military rescuers, alongside interviews with grateful Western families. Racism isn't the word for it. So you know whom we care about. From the Middle East, the whole thing looks like an obscene television remake of our preposterous interventions in other parts of the world. I called up another friend, a French ex-legionnaire, yesterday. Do I sniff a bit of old-fashioned colonial insanity here?
GMO Food Is Actually Already Labeled If You Know A Few Rules Back in 1995, I was party to some discussions about whether about-to-be-released GMO crops should be labeled at the consumer level. It was clear that a failure to do so would look to some like a conspiracy, but we also realized that it would be far too expensive to track the great rivers of grain well enough to be able to label everything accurately. Practicality won the day and GMO foods were never labeled. 15 years later this decision is still being needlessly debated. Why You Can’t Really Track All Grain It does not normally make sense for a farmer to have his/her own harvesting equipment. A “May Contain” Label Might Have Been A Better Choice I actually supported the idea of a “may contain GMO” label, recognizing that things like corn and soybeans are turned into ingredients that are in just about any processed food (corn starch, HFCS, soy protein, soybean oil…). Fruits and Vegetables The “Biotech By Choice” Brand Concept Biotech Wine A Biotech Crop to Feed the World Conclusion
?So many people died? Pham To looked great for 78 years old. (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.) His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through. Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time. And it only got worse. One, two… many Vietnams? At the beginning of the Iraq War, and for years after, reporters, pundits, veterans, politicians, and ordinary Americans asked whether the American debacle in Southeast Asia was being repeated. The same held true for Afghanistan. In those years, “Vietnam” even proved a surprisingly two-sided analogy — after, at least, generals began reading and citing revisionist texts about that war. An unimaginable toll Pham To was lucky. The numbers are staggering, the suffering incalculable, the misery almost incomprehensible to most Americans but not, perhaps, to an Iraqi.
This McDonald's burger looks the same as the day it was cooked... 14 years ago A 14-year-old cheese burger from McDonalds is still in original state fourteen years later. Vision courtesy: The Doctors To access our premium content,please subscribe or log in. It's quick and easy. The 14-year-old McDonald's burger. Proof: The McDonald's reciept. IF you need another reason to kick the junk food habit this should do it. Mr Whipple had been hoping to demonstrate the high levels of preservatives in fast food. He bought the hamburger from a McDonald's outlet way back in 1999, originally planning to keep it for a month to show friends the worrying power of preservatives. But he forgot about it, finding it two years later in an old coat pocket. It has no signs of mould, fungus or even a strange odour. The 14-year-old McDonald's burger. Mr Whipple, from Utah, explained that he never meant the experiment to last this long. "It wasn't on purpose," he told TV show The Doctors. "I was showing some people how enzymes work and I thought a hamburger would be a good idea.
Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science - Climate Change - Environment A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt. The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry. However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas. Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.
The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale In their fight against Google, traditional media firmly believe the search engine needs them to refine (and monetize) its algorithm. Let’s explore the facts. The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs and feeds into its Google News service; second, on a broader basis, for all the referencing Google builds with news media material. In the controversy, an argument keeps rearing its head. Last week, rooting for facts, I spoke with several people possessing deep knowledge of Google’s inner mechanics; they ranged from Search Engine Marketing specialists to a Stanford Computer Science professor who taught Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in the mid-90′s. First of all, pretending to know Google is indeed… pretentious. Coming back to the Press issues, let’s consider both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Now, let’s consider the nature of searches.
Tsunamis in the Alps? Nearly 1,500 years ago a massive flood in Geneva reportedly swept away everything in its path—mills, houses, cattle, even entire churches. Now researchers believe they've found the unlikely sounding culprit: a tsunami-like killer wave in the Alps. The threat, they add, may still be very much alive. Spurred by a huge landslide, the medieval Lake Geneva "tsunami" (technically defined as a seismic ocean wave) swamped the city, which was already a trading hub, according to a new study. Far from any ocean, the massive wave was likely generated by a massive landslide into the Rhône River, which feeds and flows through Lake Geneva, according to a group of Swiss researchers. The team analyzed a massive sediment deposit at the bottom of the lake's easternmost corner and determined that the material had once sat above the lake and had slid all at once into the Rhône, near where the river flows into the eastern end of Lake Geneva (map).
Rosa Parks Didn't Act Alone: Meet Claudette Colvin Rosa Parks, left, and Claudette Colvin. Parks photo from Ebony via Wikipedia Commons. In his warm-up for the first-ever inauguration of a black American president, the actor Samuel L. Parks was certainly brave. Colvin was a smart and rebellious teen whose family lived in King Hill, a small, poor section of town flanked by white neighborhoods. On March 2, 1955, a full nine months before Rosa Parks took her famous stand, Colvin boarded a city bus with her friends, taking a seat behind the first five rows, which were reserved for whites. That's what happened that day. This was nothing like Rosa Parks' quiet arrest later. Montgomery's black leaders debated whether Colvin was the proper cause celebre. The news traveled fast, and the black community was livid. On her day in court, Colvin was found guilty of all charges by a hostile judge. They held off on calling for a boycott, and instead raised money for her appeal. But Colvin made her mark on the minds of others.
A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program Click to enlarge. (Max Fisher -- The Washington Post) After Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA launched a program of "extraordinary rendition" to handle terrorism suspects. The agency's problem, as it saw it, was that it wanted to detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the United States or charging them with any crimes. Their solution was to secretly move a suspect to another country. The CIA's extraordinary rendition program is over, but its scope is still shrouded in some mystery. Their participation took several forms. Here's what the Open Society report has to say about the staggeringly global participation in the CIA program, including a full list of the countries it names: I was most curious about the involvement of two governments that are very much adversaries of the United States: those of Iran and Syria. Iran was involved in the capture and transfer of individuals subjected to CIA secret detention. The section on Syria is disturbing.