Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
, - Nation of Change/Sustainable Pulse
Stephan: Here is some lovely glyphosate news.
Credit: Sustainablepulse.com
Countries across the European Union have now joined the Great Glyphosate Rebellion that was started late last week by France, Sweden and the Netherlands.
According to anonymous Sustainable Pulse sources in Brussels, Bulgaria, Denmark, Austria, Belgium and Italy, among others, are set to also vote against the re-approval of the World’s most used herbicide in the EU and Germany are set to abstain.
Reuters reported late Monday that the vote planned for Tuesday on the re-approval of glyphosate until 2031 will now most likely be postponed, leaving the possibility of a glyphosate herbicides legal limbo, as the current approval of the chemical is set to end in June 2016.
In an amazing week in Europe GM Watch also reported that Europe’s health and food safety commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis has indicated that his directorate, DG SANTE, is exploring the possibility of full transparency for industry studies on pesticides.
This move has shaken the pesticide industry to the core as currently the industry studies submitted to support regulatory authorisations of pesticides are kept secret under commercial confidentiality agreements with regulators. Andriukaitis has said that this needs […]
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Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
Lindy West, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: I want you to read this story on two levels. One, how horrifying is it that toddlers shoot and kill more people than terrorists? We spend hundreds of billions to protect ourselves against terrorists. What do we spend protecting ourselves against our children?
Second, this is how the United States of America is portrayed in the friendliest foreign press. It gets much worse. This is what we have become. How do you feel about both these points?
Jamie Gilt, who has built a thriving web presence on the argument that guns are perfectly safe around kids, was shot by her young child.
Credit: Facebook/Jamie Gilt
This week, in my country, considered by some of its more embarrassing denizens to be the “greatest country in the world”, an outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child. Truly a pinnacle of human potential, much like the invention of paper in second-century BC China, or Aristotle holding forth in the Lyceum, or whoever first pointed out that Florida looks like America’s penis.
What do you say about the outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate who left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot […]
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Tuesday, March 15th, 2016
Tia Ghose, Senior Writer - livescience
Stephan: Here are several of my predictions confirmed. What this doesn't cover is the real estate collapse that occurs as high end coastal real estate becomes first uninsurable, and then is destroyed. It will result in trillions of dollars of losses, in addition to internal migration.
Miami Beach flooding
More than 13 million Americans could become climate refugees by 2100 if the worst sea-level rise comes to pass, new research suggests.
Rising seas caused by climate change could permanently flood hundreds of U.S. counties, according to the study. The hardest-hit county will be Miami-Dade, Florida, where 2 million people could be forced to relocate. In fact, Florida is home to about half of these potential U.S. climate refugees. (emphasis added)
“The Great Migration of southern African-Americans from the South into the North is pretty much the same kind of magnitude we’re talking about it if we don’t adequately address sea-level rise,” said study co-author Mathew Hauer, a demography doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia in Athens. [See Which Counties Could House the U.S. Climate Refugees]
However, city, county, state and local governments can take steps to mitigate some of these effects, while global work to stem climate change could mean the worst-case scenario never comes to pass, the researchers wrote in the paper, which was published today (March […]
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Jake Anderson , - Mint Press News
Stephan: There is a little noticed trend underway that does not bode well for fact-based journalism. Corporate media in the U.S. today in all its forms whether news or entertainment (sometimes it is hard to tell them apart) is essentially owned by six corporations.
Just as companies like Monsanto have been buying up small traditional seed companies, keeping the folksy affect while bringing the actual products into conformity with corporate goals, so media giants are buying up supposedly independent news outlets, retaining their look, but not their commitment to independent fact based news. Here is one of the few stories I have seen on this trend which I have been following for the past several years (see SR archives). It is getting harder and harder to find actual fact-based news.
Arianna Huffington, namesake of the media empire, The Huffington Post.
Credit: AP
One of the most powerful propaganda tools is still print journalism. Though most sources have migrated to digital platforms and now integrate video and social media avenues in order to stay relevant, acquisitions of news publications remain an insidious way to control mainstream narratives.
The following six examples mark the most egregious recent sell-outs in online journalism:
The Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington’s namesake media empire, The Huffington Post,originated in 2005 as a liberal news aggregating alternative to the Drudge Report. It even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. However, the writing was already on the wall, as one year earlier, Huffington sold HuffPo to AOL for $315 million.
The acquisition caused many to question whether major corporate influence would dramatically affect the publication. Unsurprisingly, the answer was ‘yes,’ as within a few short years the website became a pro-corporate mainstream media vessel watered down with anemic liberal platitudes. […]
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Alanna Petroff, - CNN Money
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Morocco solar installation I have covered before (see archives). This is an extraordinary project; a quite different model of solar, one that preserves the grid. If this project continues to be so successful I think power companies particularly in the West will try to replicate it.
It is fascinating to watch one of history's great technological transitions take place: carbon to non-carbon energy. It's not going to be linear.
Morocco’s Noor I solar power plant near Ouarzazate currently powers over 100,000 homes in the country.
Credit: CNN Money
Springing up on the edge of the Sahara desert are rows of curved mirrors as far as the eye can see.
They’re part of what could become the biggest solar power plant in the world.
Morocco is investing about $2.6 billion on the construction of the Ouarzazate complex, which forms the heart of a $9 billion strategy to harness one of the country’s greatest natural resources — sunshine.
When completed in 2017, it will cover an area nine times the size of New York’s Central Park and generate enough electricity to power about one million households.
The first phase was officially opened last month, and a further three linked plants will come online by the end of next year, according to the president of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy, Mustapha Bakkoury.
“It’s very impressive,” Bakkoury told CNNMoney. “You cannot […]
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