Archives for April 2013

Coal plants are the world’s most abundant and most dangerous source of carbon dioxide emissions and the most important single driver of catastrophic climate change. The two biggest CO2 polluters, China and the US, both owe their infamy to their large number of coal plants. All coal plants in the world need to be closed […]

For a different view of Iranian youth than the images of anger and menace most often purveyed in US media (as Rami Khoury rightly argues): 13-year-old Iranian girl sings Adele’s ‘Someone like You’. h/t Youtube & Reddit.com By the way, apparently Google News does not index Lebanon’s Daily Star, since I couldn’t find Rami’s article […]

A small crowd of some 500 marched in downtown Cairo on Saturday calling for the fall of the Muhammad Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, regime. It was led by the April 6 youth movement, which has turned decisively against the country’s first elected president because he and his party have been acting in dictatorial ways reminiscent of […]

Denmark gets 25% of its total electricity from wind turbines, and aims to double that by 2020. Part of its strategy is not just putting in more wind turbines but also introducing savings in electricity use. Xinhua has a video report:

Cora Currier writes at ProPublica The U.S. drone war remains cloaked in secrecy, and as a result, questions swirl around it. Who exactly can be targeted? When can a U.S. citizen be killed? Another, perhaps less frequently asked question: What happens when innocent civilians are killed in drone strikes? In February, during his confirmation process, […]

HSBC estimates that if the world adopted the policies necessary to keep global warming to only 2 degrees C. (3.6 degrees F.), oil companies would abruptly lose 60% of their value, as Hilde øvrebekk Lewis points out. Likewise, if the true cost of climate change and the inevitability of the need to move quickly to […]

Another deadly bombing was conducted this morning in Baquba, Iraq, killing 20 and wounding 60. Radicals detonated it outside a political rally for a small local Sunni Arab party. Diyala province is among Iraq’s most violent, with 560 killed last year. There are violent disputes among its Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, but also within […]

The United Nations is warning that the vast scale of the Syrian refugee crisis is straining the resources of the UN, Jordan and Lebanon. Jordan has over 400,000 Syrian refugees, who are straining its water and other resources. But their number is set to triple by the end of 2013, to over 1 million! UNICEF […]

Bill Moyer investigates the phenomenon of homelessness and poverty in the high tech Mecca, San Jose, California. It turns out to be a good metaphor for the United States as a whole.