Caveat Lector
Corporate power in the US
We can't eat our planet and have it too
News from Iran
A new conception of the world
Evolution
Take a tour of the fiction on view in the US's "Creation Museum", run by an organisation called "Answers in Genesis".
“Hominids have been right here looking at the moon rising over water for millions of years.” Where? In Aramis, Ethiopia. Forty scientists report what they have learned from a large set of
4.4-million-year-old hominid remains first discovered there in 1992. The leading scientific journal
Science has made all this material available free for browsing and downloading
here.
But
evolution ain't for sissies.
[21 January 2010]
We're all torturers now?
How the US tortured an innocent Brit for years in Gitmo.
John Yoo, famous "legaliser" of US torture,
says that if the President of the US signs an order authorising an official to crush a child's testicles, no law can stop that torture.
US courts and the US Justice Department still refuse to pursue accountability for torture and "extraordinary rendition" .
Who will?
Human Rights Watch
has condemned the UK's role in the torture of terror suspects detained in Pakistan as cruel, counter-productive and in clear breach of international law.
The British High Court rejected yet another attempt by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband to hide evidence of Britain's complicity with CIA torturers. The judges say
"what is contained in those seven redacted paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" and note that Miliband "was not prepared either to produce evidence or address argument to us".
Canada's top military commander now
admits that Canadian forces detained one person and handed him on to Afghan authorities who tortured him.
"Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] without justification." So says the CIA Inspector General's Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 - October 2003), found
here. Ray McGovern writes about it
here.
Evil as a disease vector: Philip Zimbardo on
our disposition to torture (to skip the fluff, start at
03: Lucifer).
Americans support torture more than citizens of most other civilised countries. According to Pew Research Center polls,
54% of US citizens,
62% of US white evangelical Protestants and 51% of US white non-Hispanic Catholics think torture is often or sometimes justified on suspected terrorists.
US torture of "enemy combatants" was no anomaly. For all human beings, isolation is torture.
For decades the US has tortured more domestic prisoners in this way, per capita, than any other country on earth.
Previous postings on this topic
On 7 Feb 2002 GW Bush famously declared in writing that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda". You think only rightwing governments like the Bush Administration torture people? Forget it.
Britain's Labour government has been doing it too.
Binyam Mohamed
is suing the Pentagon to prevent it from destroying evidence he was tortured.
There's no credible evidence against this Afghan teenager, but the US
tortured him for six years and still refuses to let him go home.
In 2002, President Bush announced the US would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions. As of December 2005, about
60% of Americans said they thought rendition sometimes or always justified. As of 2009,
62% of Americans oppose hearings on torture. The excellent 2008 film "Torturing Democracy" by Sherry Jones, which US networks have so far refused to show, can be seen online for free.
Meanwhile transcripts of the American torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed indicate that torture of him elicited only false confessions, and it turns out Brit Prime Minister Tony Blair knew the US was torturing prisoners, and contrary to the UN convention against torture, made it policy that UK personnel need not try to stop such torture. [21 January 2010]
Global warming basics
1 About 1370 Watts/sq m/sec reach the outside of earth's atmosphere facing the sun in daylight
2 Average Watts/sec over the whole earth is about 25% of that, ~ 340 W/sq m/sec
3 About a third of that, ~ 110 W/sq m/sec, is reflected back out to space
4 Two thirds of that reflectivity, ~ 75 W/sq m /sec, is due to clouds & small particles
5 Most of the rest, ~35 W/sq m/sec, is reflected by deserts, ice and snow
6 The planet absorbs the two thirds of solar heat not reflected, ~ 230 W/sq m /sec
7 If the planet is not to heat up, it must radiate that much back
8 It does so by emitting longwave radiation
9 To emit 230 W/sq m, a surface needs a temp of around -19°C
10 Average earth surface temperature is actually +14°C
11 The temperature needed for equilibrium, -19°C, is found 5 km above earth surface
12 Greenhouse gases (mainly H2O & CO2) keep earth surface temps near +14°C
13 Human activities that release CO2, methane &c increase the greenhouse effect
14 Atmospheric CO2 has increased about 35% since the beginning of the industrial age
15 Carbon fingerprinting shows most of that CO2 increase is due to human activities
By itself, that 35% increase in CO2 is calculated to increase surface temperature by about 1°C. To refute this conclusion, you have to empirically refute at least one of the 15 findings. [19 January 2010]
Is the US war on drugs over?
A free press doing its job
Climate change: what to do?
On the eve of the Copenhagen talks, 56 newspapers from 45 countries in 20 different languages
pleaded for a climate deal that will save the planet.
Their pleas went unanswered because of
"a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries",
especially China.
At the Copenhagen meeting an Indian official
said to US representatives: "First you do virtually nothing to cut your emissions, and then you threaten us [the developing world] with drowning from global warming sea level rise if we don’t cut ours. It won’t wash.”
To play interactively with a recent scientific climate model click
here.
The clearest non-technical summary of basic climate change facts is
here. The clearest technical summary of basic climate change facts is
here. A more detailed account is
here. Some NASA graphs
here.
For a scientific perspective on the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, see
here.
For examples of the denialist industry at work see
here. For an overview of its dirty dozen see
here.
Previous postings on climate change
Oil and other fossil fuels appear to be cheaper because miners, manufacturers and users do not pay for fossil fuel effects on climate and health. Till now they've been what economists call "externalities". Jim Hansen
says governments must impose carbon prices on fossil fuels at source, and pay the fees back to the public--it's the only way to fix the fuel market and make it economically possible for people to switch to safer energy sources.
Politicians aren't likely to take effective action to remedy the effects of climate change
until we make them do it.
Michael Jay and Prof Sir Michael Marmot say
we need to change our mindset. Analysis by the
German Advisory Board on Global Change says that to avoid disaster, the US must stop carbon emissions entirely by 2020, and the world as a whole must do so by 2050. Many scientists think
it's already too late.
The US Congress passed a global warming bill, but 212 reps, most of whom applauded the lunatic claim that climate change is a hoax,
voted against it.
How could we persuade North Americans to follow the lead of the Freiburg suburb
Vauban, where there aren't any cars and you can heat your four-room flat for less than $150 a year?
About 2,500 scientists attended the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress in March 2009, and delivered 1,400 papers.
The news isn't good—our world is heating up faster than most of the same scientists estimated just two years before.
Meanwhile the annual human death toll from global warming is now
estimated at 300,000. An earlier but good summary of the agreed facts on the subject is
here, and a catalogue of myths & falsehoods about climate change is
here. If your main concern is energy, try David Mackay's
excellent, free book on sustainable energy.
Three cheers for Google!
Browser wars
Conscienceless corporations
Niall Ferguson's love of war
Lies about Iraq were good for no-one's health
Absurdities & disasters of religious faith
US health care debacle
A review of Obama's health care reform promises that his health care reform legislation breaks.
Between
57% and
72% of Americans want a public health insurance option.
Phalanxes of rightwing bullies funded by corporate America, and legislators owned by corporate America, are blocking it.
One way that health insurance companies screw Americans:
they just raise the premiums of sick people till people can’t pay them.
The New Republic discusses the swiftboating of health reform in the US.
Rachel Maddow reviews some of the many threats of violence in the rightwing campaign to trash US health care reform.
The campaign has its comic moments.
Investor's Business Daily wrote:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in
the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this
brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
but removed it after someone realised Hawking lives in the UK.
Insuring and delivering health care for profit makes for better profits but worse health care. What countries have the best system? Perhaps
the French? In the 1 June 2009 New Yorker see
The Cost Conundrum by Atal Gawande. On the 11 June 2009 New York Times Op-Ed page see
This Time, We Won't Scare by Nicholas Kristof.
Meanwhile
who do you suppose dropped tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on US Senators who vote against FDA regulation of tobacco?
Even the American Medical Association (AMA) now supports universal health insurance. That's a big change for them. The AMA supported segregation, opposed President Truman’s plans for national health insurance, supported the tobacco industry's attempts to block tobacco control, opposed and denounced Medicare, and opposed President Clinton’s health reform plan.
[21 December 2009]
Do something
Derrick Jensen says it's time for us all to decolonise our hearts and minds, then do something.
Decolonise our hearts and minds? That means identify more with the land we use than with the governments and businesses who "own" it. Study the harm our culture does to other people, other cultures and the planet. Stay aware that many people, many animals and much of the land pays dearly for our luxuries, and that we live in a corporate plutocracy more than a functioning democracy.
Then do something about it.
[20 December 2009]
Bad science from governments and corporations
Violence and us
Small victories department:
The Catalonian parliament has voted to ban bullfighting.
Eric Stoner is crystal clear on contradictions and insincerities in Obama's defence of war.
Even in apparently peaceful Canada,
violence in kids' sports is an alarming problem.
What's more barbaric—dogfighting or US football?
Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's a close call.
How violent is the self-styled
pro-life movement? Since 1977 the US "pro-life" movement has
committed 7 murders (now 8 counting Dr Tiller), 41 bombings, 175 arsons, 390 break-ins, 1,400 acts of vandalism, 1,993 trespasses, 100 butyric acid attacks, 179 assault-and-batteries, 4 kidnappings and 151 burglaries. Over the same period these people attempted 17 murders and 96 bombings and arsons, made 659 anthrax threats, made 406 other death threats, and were arrested 33,834 times. Is their violence just a
pattern, or a strategy?
[18 December 2009]
Tony Blair, liar
We register our cars. Why not our guns?
How many earths do we need if everyone lives like you?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute of Lying
The Competitive Enterprise Institute's
lies about climate change aren't new. It began life in the US in the 1980s to fight drug safety, rent control, and automobile safety regulations. In the 1990s, CEI's Michelle Malkin and Michael Fumento published a book claiming dioxin is good for your health. CEI gets support from the tobacco, petroleum, coal and pharmaceutical industries.
[25 November 2009]
We just don't know
"The central flaw of the economic orthodoxy against which Keynes fought ... was to imagine that ... human ignorance of the future had been solved. The error was repeated in the 1990s, when economists came to believe that complex mathematical formulae could tame uncertainty in the murky world of derivatives."
So writes John Gray, oh so cogently.
[22 November 2009]
What to do in Afghanistan?
Peter Bergen and Leslie Gelb
say that without the western war effort in Afghanistan, the Taliban would soon be able to again give sanctuary there to al Qaida.
Malalai Joya, perhaps the bravest woman in Afghanistan,
disagrees: she says western countries are wasting money, blood and lives in her country, that
"liberation was a big lie".
Former UK Ambassador to Afghanistan Craig Murray
disagrees more strongly. More than half Afghanistan's opium exports are controlled by members of the Karzai government. Karzai and his brother are involved. Less than a tenth is contolled by Taliban supporters. The CIA sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for torture.
The main reason for using US and European tax dollars to make war in Afghanistan is a gas pipeline deal initiated in the 1990s by Bush the lesser, his father, Karzai and Unocal. Look at where US troops are deployed in Afghanistan; it follows the pipeline route. "Karzai ... they should have taken him to Florida to learn about voting".
And a Canadian diplomat
has told a Canadian parliamentary committee that Canadians handed over many innocent Afghans to Afghan authorities for torture.
[19 November 2009]
Oil crunch
In all years save one from 1930 through 1980, humankind discovered more oil than we used. For the next few years, discovery and use balanced approximately. Since 1986, we are using more oil than we are discovering.
Much more. As the chart shows, there's a growing gap between discoveries and production. World oil production is running flat out. Coming soon: a gap between production and demand.
And oil industry whistleblowers at the International Energy Agency
say the US and the oil cartel have pressured the IEA to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves--because they fear the truth would incite an oil price panic runup. A detailed report is
here.
[17 November 2009]
Blackwater: Cheney’s thugs
Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn ...
On 9 Nov 1989
Olenka Frankiel was the first reporter to see East Germans walking freely through the suddenly open Brandenburg Gate.
[9 November 2009]
Free-market capitalism: we love it, we hate it
"How is it that Michael Moore's father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today?"
The answer is that till 1973, employees got a piece of the gains from productivity growth, but since, hardly at all.
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, taking the USSR and its rotting empire with it, majorities in many countries including the US, Germany, France, Canada and the UK
agree in a BBC poll that free-market capitalism needs reform or massive change.
Why then is it so hard to get those reforms done?
"We have created a market system that makes doing the right thing impossible, and the people who appear to be leading are actually following its pathological dictates."
See the movie.
[9 November 2009]
The singular liar Michael Behe
The idiocy of Freakonomics
Lach Walesa on democracy
"Democracy is made up of three elements. One is whether the laws support pluralistic principles. The second is whether the people take advantage of these laws. The third element is whether the peoples' wallets are thick enough to benefit from this democracy. In Poland, we have the legal foundation for democracy. We haven't proven very adept at taking advantage of it however. And the situation of our wallets is even worse."
So says Lach Walesa, the
founder of Solidarity (Solidarnosc).
[7 November 2009]
Islam and freedom of speech
A Saudi lawyer has demanded that Danish newspapers apologise for cartoons caricaturing "The Great Prophet"
or else.
Apologise for free speech?
Won't we make more progress against the censors if we share the fun? To see what all the fuss was about, click on the image to the right.
[2 November 2009]
China the bully
Conservatives tend to be dumber than liberals
Copyright craziness
Palestine and Israel
US sponsors UN attack on freedom of speech
We are the people
So said banners in Leipzig on the morning of 9 Oct 1989. They feared that East German authorities would imitate the barbaric Chinese example of Tienanmen Square, but two weeks later, 350,000 citizens filled the city square. "It was a self-liberation. We did it without the dollar or the DAX, without the US or Soviet armies,",
said pastor Christian Führer, who for years had led weekly prayer/discussion meetings at the 800-year-old Nicolaikirche in Leipzig.
[9 October 2009]
Obama the bought
Barack Obama promised no more ownership of government by special and moneyed interests. He said “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” Really? He's been making backroom deals with Wall Street and Big Pharma. He's willing to chuck the public health insurance option even though two-thirds of the public want it. Given this sleaze, should we be surprised that two of the most powerful Obama-era lobbyists are brother and sister-in-law to John Podesta, White House Chief-of-Staff, and that they
donated the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster?
[4 October 2009]
US Supreme Court slams the door
Javard Iqbal was jailed, beaten, denied medical care and food and otherwise brutalised by US federal agents in the post-9/11 wave of official abuse of US Arabs and Muslims. His lawsuit listed 153 particulars, but the US Supreme Court's gang of five rightwing justices
rejected the claim on the grounds that he had not submitted enough evidence, and the ruling has already allowed lower courts to dismiss thousands of other lawsuits.
[1 October 2009]
The lunacy of US rightwing media
The National Review
listed Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" as one of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century!
Sara Robinson has debunked US media lies about health care in Canada (
Part 1,
Part 2.
[29 September 2009]
Wangari Maathai
"If
one little woman of no significance except her stubbornness can do this, surely the government can be changed."
[28 September 2009]
News that's fit to watch or read?
During the Cold War, the BBC and Canada's CBC offered news that was less biased and less controlled by big money than US media and Voice of America. Behind the Iron Curtain, the BBC and CBC offered much better balance than either Radio Moscow or Voice of America; listening to the BBC and CBC was often illegal, but people listened anyway. In the west, the BBC and CBC were invaluable.
Sadly, since 1989 the BBC and CBC have become less independent. Is a news agency picking up the slack? Yes, in Qatar: Al Jazeera, on the web at
http://english.aljazeera.net/, and available in most countries (see "Availability" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera) despite many attempts to censor it (see "Attacks on and censorship of Al Jazeera" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera).
[23 September 2009]
Law enforcement gone mad
Is Obama safe?
Islamist barbarity to women
In Afghanistan, downloading an article about women's rights and Islam can get you a death sentence. Karzai pardoned the bloke but
the upper house of the Afghan parliament condemned the pardon as contrary to the Islamic values.
Hasibullah Sadiqi of Ottawa murdered his sister Khatera and her fiancé Feroz Mangal because he objected to Khatera moving in with Feroz before getting married. The Crown says the killing was "for the purpose of restoring the family's reputation and respect in the Afghan community."
That's terrorism.
Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, a Sudanese woman journalist and UN public information officer for Sudan, is challenging Sudan's strict dress laws for women. She's charged with wearing "indecent" clothing, meaning trousers. The government
beat and tear-gassed 50 women demonstrating peacefully for her. She will be flogged if convicted. The court said her UN employment gives her immunity, so she resigned from the UN to force the issue. More at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6732051.ece.
Judges in the Maldives have
sentenced 150 women to flogging for having sex with more than one man.
Till recently, law and custom in most of the world considered women the property of men. In societies governed by Islamists,
that's still the case.
[17 September 2009]
Increasing cooperation: carrot or stick?
We're all mutants
Each one of us is an original, with about a hundred genetic mutations. See the original research report
here and an easy-to-read BBC gloss on it
here.
[2 September 2009]
Capital punishment in the US
In 2004 Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for setting a fire that killed his three very young children. Five years later,
he has been proved innocent.
[1 September 2009]
Did the building blocks of life arrive from space?
Land of the free?
Does chiropractic achieve what it claims?
Apparently
some chiropractors think not---the McTimoney Chiropractic Association sent a confidential email to its members telling them “If you have a website, take it down NOW … REMOVE all the blue MCA patient information leaflets, or any patient information leaflets of your own that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems in your clinic … IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE, YOU MAY BE AT RISK FROM PROSECUTION. Finally, we strongly suggest you do NOT discuss this with others ... especially patients.”
[3 August 2009]
The religious idiocy of Francis Collins
Francis Collins, Obama's pick for head of NIH, showed these slides at UC Berkeley:
"Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time."
"God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings."
"After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced 'house' (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul."
"We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement."
"If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?"
More at
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/sam_harris_on_collins_appointm.php.
[27 July 2009]
Roman Catholic barbarity for raped children
The Roman Catholic Church has
confirmed its policy to excommunicate anyone who helps provide abortion for a raped child, even when she's nine years old and was raped by her stepfather.
[22 July 2009]
Charged in the US with being alive while being black
Arundhati Roy
GM crops-panacea or peril?
Is the problem that US corporations have bought most of the GM research findings we know about, or is it that GM crops put us at as much risk as global warming?
Even exports do not agree.
[10 July 2009]
The unbearable silliness of Karen Armstrong
Can animals count?
Candlesnuffing ideas they don't like
Welcome to the world of
"think tanks", where corporate reps on governing boards like "to candlesnuff ideas we do not like", and a philosopher at Princeton was quietly taking $54,000 a year from the Japanese tobacco industry for his services.
[5 July 2009]
Jesus 'n Mo figure out science and religion
Small victory
The Chinese government
has indefinitely postponed its plan to force censorship software onto every computer sold in China.
[1 July 2009]
Auschwitz was a small part of the problem
The Soviets and the Nazis murdered 12 million people between 1933 and 1944. Coming to terms with Auschwitz
is only a beginning.
[28 June 2009]
European politicians like their conversations scripted?
According to
Der Spiegel, Obama's spontaneity is a big problem for Angela Merkel: "Chancellors and presidents like to stick to a program, because it gives them security. In Dresden, Obama remained true to the program at first. But then he unexpectedly asked "Angela" why, exactly, she didn't want Turkey to be accepted into the European Union. Merkel was taken aback. She had to think on her feet and quickly come up with an answer for an issue on which she had no pre-prepared comments."
[23 June 2009]
The 2nd amendment ain't about hunting
“Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules”, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference in
February 2009. "The Second Amendment ain't about hunting" says a US bumper sticker. Writing in the
Harvard Law Review, Thomas M Moncure Jr agreed entirely. The liberty that the NRA talks about is the liberty to make the rules while in possession of a gun.
[20 June 2009]
Hemp
For many applications it's better than oil. It grows quickly. It's good for biomass, bioremediation and sustainability. It's better than corn for biofuel. It needs no pesticides. Its fibre can replace fibreglass. It can be made into almost any building material.
Its day is coming.
[18 June 2009]
Cuba before Castro
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
looks at several books about Cuba before Castro, when it was run mostly by US corporations and US gangsters.
[17 June 2009]
US gulag
The US imprisoned, without trial and for many years, 22 Uighurs captured in Pakistan. They had never been terrorists. 17 of them were kept at Guantanamo for two years. There is no evidence against them, but the US Congress wants them imprisoned for life. When Bermuda
kindly agreed to accept four of them as immigrants, rightwing British and US media screamed bloody murder. Wikipedia has a good
summary of the facts.
[17 June 2009]
Shell pays for murders of Ken Saro-Wiwa and others
In the 1990s, Nigeria's dictatorship needed Shell's oil export revenue, so it helped Shell silence protests and in 1995, after a rigged trial, executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other non-violent environmentalist campaigners. Now Shell has avoided a trial on the matter by
settling for $15.5M. Here is the
video about this that Shell still doesn't want us to see.
[9 June 2009]
How did life begin?
Science has closed many of the mysterious gaps we used to fill in with the works and deeds of imagined gods. The origin of our solar system and of the universe. The evolution of continents and of life forms on Earth. How about life itself? James Trefl, Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith think we are closing this gap too. It was all about the laws of chemistry.
More...
[9 June 2009]
Nothing to lose but your prejudices
US historian Peter Baldwin runs a lot of Europe-US differences, and
finds a lot less difference than folks on either side of the ocean might expect.
[9 June 2009]
Did tribal wars lead us to evolve altruism?
Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has archeologic evidence that we evolved altruism as a survival-enhancing group response to tribal warfare before we "settled down" to being farmers. A non-technical account of the work is
here, the scientific abstract is
here, and the full original paper is
here (requires subscription or article purchase).
[7 June 2009]
Magicology
"Trust your senses!" says the realist. Rubbish, say
Penn and Teller.
[6 June 2009]
Knowledge is power
That's the name of a US grassroots open-enrolment, college-prep program for disadvantaged children that started in Houston in 1994. Now there are 66 such schools in 19 states. All 48 students in the first class to graduate from Gaston College Preparatory School in North Carolina are going to college. Bob Herbert has written about that school
here (no registration needed) and
here (registration needed).
[6 June 2009]
Bottled water: just say no
Pretty good
slide show tries to persuade us not to.
[5 June 2009]
Is it libel to criticise chiropractic?
Commons that work
Garrett Hardin says he mistitled his paper; he should have called it "The Tragedy of the
Unmanaged Commons". A
rebuttal of the myth. Freedom with vigilance, licence with surveillance: Wikipedia is a commons that works
brilliantly.
[2 June 2009]
Why inequality matters
The bigger the wealth gap between rich and poor, the sicker and stupider and more criminal we become. That's the finding of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, epidemiologists from Nottingham and York universities. Their 2009 book got a favourable
review from the Times of London. Wilkinson's earlier book on the same subject is available in paperback
here.
[31 May 2009]
Globalisation
Iranian activist Abed Tavancheh got a year in prison for giving an interview to Der Spiegel about student protests.
