The continuing crisis over high food prices has inspired a round of global finger-pointing. Politicians blame speculators, and speculators blame the Federal Reserve. Free-traders blame countries with agricultural subsidies, and countries with agricultural subsidies blame free-traders. And everyone blames the ethanol industry: The current mania to turn food crops, especially corn, into gasoline is pushing up the global price for maize, crowding out the production of other crops and generally creating an unfair competition between gas tanks in Missouri and poor consumers in Mumbai. But judging by recent financial results, the big villains in this story-the American companies that are responding to government mandates by buying about 20 percent of the U.S. corn harvest and processing it into fuel-aren’t exactly thriving. In fact, their bottom lines and stock prices are suffering pretty badly. VeraSun is one of the largest U.S. producers of ethanol. Last month it completed its merger with U.S. BioEnergy, giving it an annual capacity of nearly 1 billion gallons. (For 2007, total U.S. production was about 6.5 billion gallons.) In the 2007 fourth quarter, VeraSun ran all out, making 142.1 million gallons, double its output in the 2006 fourth quarter. But prices fell (down 14 […]
It’s a classic stand-off between one of the world’s best loved animals and one of its most unpopular leaders, between the planet’s largest bear and its most powerful man. And it comes to a head this week. On Thursday, by order of a federal judge, George W Bush must stop stalling on whether to designate the polar bear as a species endangered by global warming. The designation could have huge consequences for his climate-change policies; his administration would, by law, have to avoid doing anything that would ‘jeopardise the continued existence’ of the mammal whose habitat is melting away. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the administration has sought to avoid the decision. It has delayed it for months, and was seeking to put it off for months more. But two weeks ago Claudia Wilken, the judge, ruled it had long been ‘in violation of the law’, and ordered it to act by 15 May. Polar bears depend on the sea ice for hunting, mating and moving around. Last summer, 200,000 square miles of ice – more than twice the size of Britain – melted for the first time, shrinking the frozen sea to an extent that the Intergovernmental Panel on […]
ATLANTA — Concern about Salvia divinorum, a shamanistic herb from Mexico that some US teenagers are using to get a hallucinogenic high, not only is spurring parents to have heart-to-heart talks with kids, but also has led some states to outlaw it. A concentrated leaf compound that’s usually smoked in water pipes, Salvia divinorum – known as ‘Sally D’ or ‘magic mint’ on the streets – causes users to briefly lose their grip on reality. Some 3,500 video clips of teens experimenting with the drug have popped up on YouTube, driving up its popularity even as vendors, aware of efforts to ban it, are basically throwing going-out-of-business sales. The highly concentrated compound made from a kind of mint plant remains legal in all but eight states, available in smoke shops and even gas station mini-marts. It can also be obtained via the Internet. Its easy availability and disorienting properties come as a surprise to parents and many lawmakers, who are asking why the US government has not yet outlawed its sale. Yet salvia’s unusual chemistry, nontoxicity, and potential research benefits have made the compound a cause célèbre among some researchers and spiritualists who say prohibition is the […]
In a new blow to the Bush administration’s troubled military commission system, a military judge has disqualified a Pentagon general who has been centrally involved in overseeing Guantánamo war crimes tribunals from any role in the first case headed for trial. The judge said the general was too closely aligned with the prosecution, raising questions about whether he could carry out his role with the required neutrality and objectivity. Military defense lawyers said that although the ruling was limited to one case, they expected the issue to be raised in other cases, potentially delaying prosecutions, including the death-penalty prosecution of six detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics of the military commission system said Friday that the judge’s decision would provide new grounds to attack the system that they say was set up to win convictions. The judge, Capt. Keith J. Allred of the Navy, directed that Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann of the Air Force Reserve, a senior Pentagon official of the Office of Military Commissions, which runs the war crimes system, have no further role in the first prosecution, scheduled for trial this month. General Hartmann, whose title is […]
Every few weeks Gordon Elliott drives 22 miles to the Hare and Hounds pub in Marple, Cheshire, collects a barrel of waste cooking oil from his stepdaughter and takes it back to his personal oil refinery in his garage in Leigh, near Bolton. The retired construction site manager then decants the liquid into a machine and adds a few chemicals. Twenty-four hours later the waste oil has been purified, filtered and refined and is ready to be used in one of his family’s two diesel cars. Instead of paying £1.25p a litre at the local supermarket, he has paid 15p to make his own biodiesel. He says he is saving nearly £100 a month – as well as 90% of the greenhouse gases he would normally emit from driving. The cars perform perfectly, the equipment will be paid for within a year and the pleasure of making his own fuel is intense. ‘It’s the principle. I do it for the environment and to spite the exchequer,’ he said. Elliott, 79, is part of a cottage industry of people who have turned to making their own recycled ‘biodiesel’ in response to the doubling of fuel prices in just over […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
