25th April 08 - Tom Crompton, BBC

Small changes to the way we live our lives are not enough to tackle the environmental challenges facing the planet, argues Tom Crompton. In the BBC's Green Room article this week, he says the stark reality is that the only option is to cut the unsustainable consumption of the Earth's finite resources.

24th April 08 - Paul Roberts, Mother Jones magazine

On February 1, 2006, Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, arrived at the White House in a state of agitation. The night before, in his State of the Union address, President Bush had declared the United States to be "addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world." He had announced plans to "break this addiction" by developing alternatives—including a multibillion-dollar subsidized ramp-up of biofuels—and had boldly stated that by 2025, America could cut imports from Gulf states by three-quarters and "make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past." "I was taken aback," Prince Faisal later told cnn, "and I raised this point with government officials."

24th April 08 - Jeremy Rose, Scoop

I'm no economist, and definitely not a Nobel Prize winning one, but by my calculations Joseph Stiglitz has under-estimated the cost of the Iraq war by a factor of 100 in his recently released The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. The difference in our calculations is simple enough: I've assumed that the citizens of the United States and Iraq have an equal value. Stiglitz and his co-author Linda Blimes, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to limit their calculations to the cost of the war to the USA.

23rd April 08 - Thalif Deen, IPS News

A significant proportion of the world's 2.2 billion children, many of whom are victims of violence, sexual abuse, labour exploitation and preventable diseases, are from the crisis-plagued African continent.  As the United Nations points out, too many of the world's children, largely African, have been "bought and sold, exploited and abused, harmed and orphaned." Of the 11 countries where 20 percent or more of children die before the age of five, 10 are in Africa: Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Sierra Leone. The only non-African country on that list is Afghanistan.

23rd April 08 - Michael Barker, Global Research

Social movements come and go, represent all manner of political beliefs, and aim to achieve their political objectives by influencing a particular target group’s opinion. Some groups reach out directly to just a few key decision makers or constituencies, while others act more indirectly by broadcasting their message to as wide an audience as possible. Writing in 1993, William Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld suggested that social movements rely on the media for three main services, (1) mobilisation of political support, (2) legitimisation (or validation) in the mainstreams discourse, and (3) to broaden the scope of conflicts. [1] Consequently, the quality and nature of the media coverage that social movements obtain strongly influences how they are perceived in the public eye – to the extent that good or bad coverage can help to make or break a social movement.

22nd April 08 - Terrence McNally interviews Lester Brown, Alternet

Of all the resources needed to build an economy that will sustain economic progress, none is more scarce than time. That is one of the key messages of PLAN-B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the newest book by Lester Brown -- available as a free download at earthpolicy.org. Plan A -- the western fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economic model -- is not going to work for China, India, or the 3 billion other people in developing countries, and it will not continue to work for the industrial countries either. It's time for Plan B -- an all-out response at wartime speed proportionate to the magnitude of threats facing civilization.

22nd April 08 - Bill Quigley, Counterpunch

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the  lives of six people.  There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina  Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco,  Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that  last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal  crops.

21st April 08 - Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian (UK)

When was the last time you were hungry? Not the pang of a missed breakfast or delayed lunch, but the gnawing obsession of a hunger that has lasted 24 hours? For me, it was 25 years ago - when, for 10 days I lived off one bowl of gruel a day for breakfast. The memory of the desperate desire for food followed by a debilitating weakness has lasted a quarter of a century. But while my experience was a lifestyle choice, for the villagers of the rural district of Katine, in Uganda, it is their everyday life.

20th April 08 - Christine Ahn, Foreign Policy in Focus

On April 11, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a report that found that of the national efforts to improve U.S. food safety, “none of the targets were reached in 2007.” According to the CDC, 76 million Americans – one in four – come down with food poisoning every year. Among the most common is E. coli, a byproduct of the system of industrialized animal agribusiness. Americans have a common perception that the problem stems from food coming from outside the country – from China, say, or Mexico. Instead, it's our food that's the problem. 

18th April 08 - Prof. James Petras

Venezuela ’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture. Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance.