MN News Review - Saturday 24th May

Brought to you today courtesy of the London Indo

UK leads Fairtrade shopping revolution as sales hit £560m - London Indo

British consumers willing to pay more for ethical products are at the forefront of a global surge in fair trade, new figures reveal. UK sales jumped 72 per cent last year, from £325m to £560m, more than double the rise in Germany and France, according to the Fairtrade Foundation.


Spain's drought: a glimpse of our future?

Barcelona is in the grip of a climate crisis on a scale never seen before in modern-day Europe. And now this parched city is being forced to import supplies from France.

Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital's weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.


Does this really mark the end of New Labour?

The New Labour coalition of support has collapsed. To the left and to the right, voters are deserting the once-heaving big tent that propelled Labour to power and kept it there for more than a decade.

The Conservatives' overwhelming victory in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election is the latest, vivid sign of the new, formidably sized anti-Labour tent that is forming around the country. The local elections earlier this month and the ousting of Ken Livingstone as London Mayor were equally potent examples of the hostile anti-Government mood.


I give up, says Brazilian minister who fought to save the rainforest


Cyber with Rosie:
The Big Question: Is broadband narrowing the gap between town and country?

If Laurie Lee were alive today and writing about life in rural Gloucestershire, he might want to call his novel Cyber with Rosie, to judge from the Communications Market Report of the media regulator Ofcom. Ofcom has discovered that 59 per cent of rural households are now using broadband, compared with 57 per cent of households in the city.

From being a leisure toy for city-dwellers, broadband has become a convenience for people who live down country lanes, away from the shops. It seems that having broadband in the home is a bit like having a black-and-white television half a century ago. Recently, it marked you out as someone unusual; very soon, there will hardly be a home on your street without it.

Barcelona's difficulty reminds me of Dublin's dastardly scheme to channel water away from the Wesht to fuel their own leaky system. And they say country living is unsustainable.

905 wrote:

Barcelona's difficulty reminds me of Dublin's dastardly scheme to channel water away from the Wesht to fuel their own leaky system. And they say country living is unsustainable.

I am that cyberrosie. The islands were quick to pick up on broadband too - it is one of my dreams to see Ireland fully geared up and to cut down on the amount of physical journeys made in favour of cybertrips.

Part of Spain's water crisis is to do with growing fruit and veg for export in plastic tunnels, and also to do with bloody golf courses and tourism.

Spain is moving towards solar powered desalination - will they empty the Med next?

Brought to you from the Internation Herald Tribune


Pentagon audit faults payments to contractors in Iraq

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the U.S. Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the U.S. military spent about $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a congressional hearing on the payments.


Russia and China join to condemn U.S. missile shield

BEIJING: President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia and President Hu Jintao of China met Friday to conclude a deal on nuclear cooperation and together condemn U.S. proposals for a missile shield in Europe. Both countries called the U.S. plan a setback to international trust that was likely to upset the balance of power.

Medvedev's choice of China for an early diplomatic foray as president seemed to signal a desire to continue Moscow's assertive foreign policy - particularly toward the United States - that was a hallmark of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, during his eight years in office.


South Africa-India telecom deal collapses

NEW DELHI: The world's largest corporate deal in an emerging market, a tie-up worth nearly $50 billion between two telecommunication companies, Bharti Airtel in India and MTN Group in South Africa, came to a screeching halt Saturday.

Bharti called off negotiations after MTN turned Bharti's takeover plan upside down - proposing to take over Bharti instead. After bankers from both sides agreed in principle to a Bharti-controlled structure on May 16, MTN's board met this week and proposed a different transaction, in which Bharti Airtel would become a subsidiary of MTN, Bharti said Saturday.


Opposition leader returning to Zimbabwe

JOHANNESBURG: Morgan Tsvangirai, the chief rival of Zimbabwe's authoritarian president, Robert Mugabe, drove up to a Harare police station last year to check on dozens of his supporters inside on their bellies, being kicked, clobbered and stomped.

The officers quickly stopped and grabbed him. Witnesses said the station reverberated with the sickening thwack of blows to his buttocks, back and head.

"They were fighting with each other to beat him," said Tendai Biti, his deputy in the opposition party.

Alpha NERDS
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/23/opinion/edbrooks.php]
In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a book called "If I Ran the Zoo," which contained the sentence, "I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!" According to the psychologist David Anderegg, that's believed to be the first printed use of the word "nerd" in modern English.

The next year, Newsweek noticed that nerd was being used in Detroit as a substitute for "square." But, as Anderegg writes in his book, "Nerds," the term didn't really blossom onto mass consciousness until The Fonz used it in "Happy Days," in the mid- to late-'70s . And thus began what you might call the ascent of nerdism in modern America.