Stephan: The cycles and processes of nature are always interconnected and interdependent, and this is an excellent example of what I mean. Poisons are killing honey bees, affecting wild bees, and climate change is breaking down the stasis of our food ecology. Unless this is reversed the results will be devastating.
Some of the most healthful foods you can think of - blueberries, cranberries, apples, almonds and squash - would never get to your plate without the help of insects. No insects, no pollination. No pollination, no fruit.
Farmers who grow these crops often rely on honeybees to do the job. But scientists are now reporting that honeybees, while convenient, are not necessarily the best pollinators.
A huge collaboration of bee researchers, from more than a dozen countries, looked at how pollination happens in dozens of different crops, including strawberries, coffee, buckwheat, cherries and watermelons. As they report in the journal Science, even when beekeepers installed plenty of hives in a field, yields usually got a boost when wild, native insects, such as bumblebees or carpenter bees, also showed up.
‘The surprising message in all of this is that honeybees cannot carry the load. Honeybees need help from their cousins and relatives, the other wild bees,’ says Marla Spivak, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota. ‘So let’s do something to promote it, so that we can keep honeybees healthy and our wild bee populations healthy.’
Unfortunately, a second study, also released in Science this week, makes it clear that wild bees aren’t […]
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LAURA MILLER, Senior Writer - Salon/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: The sense of persecution that is part of the DNA of Christianity begins here. I have to admit this story stunned me. Perhaps like you I had seen the early Christian period as a time of persecution and martyrdom. But I spent some time looking into this, and I think Professor Candida Moss' work is solid, and is destined to be the accepted view. We need to reconsider this period through a very different prism.
In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said ‘Yes
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Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
JOAQUIN SAPIEN, - Pro Publica
Stephan: Here is home truth about guns in the home. It is not what the NRA would have you believe. However, as I said the other day I am afraid this entire debate about guns has been rendered largely meaningless by the rise of 3-D printing.
During the course of Operation Iraqi Freedom 6,630 American service personnel were killed by enemy actions. During that same time 270,000 Americans were killed by firearms, approximately a third of all the deaths during the Civil War. We have a ongoing low profile war taking place on our soil. And if you have a gun in your house you are much more likely to be a casualty of this war.
President Obama has directed the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence as part of his legislative package on gun control. The CDC hasn’t pursued this kind of research since 1996 when the National Rifle Association lobbied Congress to cut funding for it, arguing that the studies were politicized and being used to promote gun control. We’ve interviewed Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who led the agency’s gun violence research in the nineties when he was the director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
We talked to Rosenberg about the work the agency was doing before funding was cut and how it’s relevant to today’s gun control debate. Here’s an edited transcript.
There’s been coverage recently about how Congress cut funding for gun violence research, but not much about what the agency was actually researching and what it was finding. You were in charge of that. Tell us a little bit about what the CDC was doing back then.
There were basically four questions that we were trying to answer. The first question is what is the problem? Who were the victims? Who was killed? Who were injured? Where did they happen? Under what circumstances? When? What times of the […]
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Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
JOHN VIDAL, - The Guardian/Observer (U.K.)
Stephan: Here, from India, is what may be the answer to the industrial agriculture being pushed by corporate interests. With no GMO, and none of the toxic herbicides and pesticides, substituting instead working with the earth, and nature's processes. This story is a case study in two opposing ways of viewing the world, and the success of the SRI process described in this report. I take this as very good news.
Note that once again, I had to go to non-U.S. sources to get this story.
I predict that you will not see this story in the corporate media but should some mention occur that you will see an aggressive disinformation campaign designed to cast doubt on this achievement by poor Indian farmers.
BIHAR, INDIA —
Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually managed. But every stalk he cut on his paddy field near the bank of the Sakri river seemed to weigh heavier than usual, every grain of rice was bigger and when his crop was weighed on the old village scales, even Kumar was shocked.
This was not six or even 10 or 20 tonnes. Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India’s poorest state Bihar, had – using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides – grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare of land. This was a world record and with rice the staple food of more than half the world’s population of seven billion, big news.
It beat not just the 19.4 tonnes achieved by the ‘father of rice’, the Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, but the World Bank-funded scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and anything achieved by the biggest European and American seed and GM […]
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Saturday, March 2nd, 2013
SAM MASTERS, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: This is a very sad truth. It is the creature of a concerted disinformation campaign on the part of those corporate interests which profit from the continuance of carbon energy, and the failure of the American and British governments, because they are essentially owned by those corporate interests, to meaningfully address the reality science describes.
As a result people accommodate, they give up, and hunker down, with the result that nothing is done, and the world of our children, and their children, will be radically different.
It is my belief that the long term result of this will be that the U.S. and the U.K., particularly the U.S., will fall further and further behind, and the centers of real geopolitical power will shift to other nations.
Public concern about environmental issues including climate change has slumped to a 20-year low since the financial crisis, a global study reveals.
Fewer people now consider issues such as CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, animal species loss, and water shortages to be ‘very serious
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