blessed britons

British resident Bisher al-Rawi has told how he was betrayed by the [UK] security service despite having helped keep track of Abu Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's 'ambassador in Europe'. He was abducted and stripped naked by US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul in Afghanistan.
He was taken on to the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before being released last March ... after four years' detention without charge... the British did not intervene on the grounds he did not have a UK passport. The government claimed he was the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime.

— David Rose

mad world

* Junk mail in the U.S. accounts for one-third of all the mail delivered in the world
* More than 100,000,000,000 pieces of junk mail are delivered each year (that’s more than 800 pieces per household)
* The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the manufacturing of the 6.5 million tons of paper required for junk mail annually is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 3.7 million cars
* More than 100 million trees a year are cut down and made into paper for junk mail. Those trees come from endangered forests like Canada’s Boreal and Indonesia’s rainforests

Do Not Mail

food crisis

not thinking the human costs

Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 16:16.

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

new york diners and the irrawady delta

Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 20:20.

it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York's Four Seasons Grill Room...

Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it's possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.

selling off grain reserves

Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 16:23.

In 1998 and 1999, the Malawi government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn...