Critical Times

Guerilla gardeners across the world say they are fighting a win-win war, writes Kate Kelland.

THEY work under the cover of night, armed with seed bombs, chemical weapons and pitchforks. Their tactics are anarchistic, their attitude revolutionary.

A Japanese crew were discovered selling salted whale meat from their ship on return from Antarctica which violates Japan’s ’scientific research’ permit. The Nisshin Maru crew members were interviewed, informing Greenpeace that dozens of workers resold salted meat not included in the official whaling statistics. The ship’s operator Kyodo Sempaku insisted that giving crew members ’souvenir’ meat was a decade-old custom.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the New Labour government is destroying one of the the venerable features of “communal decency” in Britain – the local post office. Economies need to be made, though not in the pursuit of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community.

Compared to the euro, the value of the US dollar has fallen 76 per cent in the last five years. So who would want to be paid in a currency that’s losing its grunt? Not Iran. It’s hedging its bets by selling its oil in a basketful of currencies brimming with euros and Chinese yuan.

A speech by ARUNDHATI ROY

This article was delivered as a lecture in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos.

I NEVER met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago, I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying “We are all Armenians,” “We are all Hrant Dink.

HUMAN-generated climate change is making flowers bloom sooner and autumn leaves fall later and is turning polar bears into cannibals and birds into early breeders, a global study has found.

Hundreds of previous studies had noted specific changes and most suggested a link to so-called anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming, but a new analysis published in the journal Nature correlated earlier studies with changes in temperature, the study’s lead author said.

The study found the early arrival of migratory birds in Australia, declining water levels in western Victoria and a 50 per cent decline in Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin population were linked to rising temperatures.

Bob Briton

From “The Guardian” 23 April, 2008

The warnings are dire: “Imminent wars will break out due to worsening living conditions in poor countries,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said recently. On top of the planet’s climate change crisis and oil resources crisis, we now have a food crisis that threatens the existing order. The world market price of staple foods has gone up 75 percent in the past two months.

Renfrey Clarke

19 April 2008

John Bellamy Foster, author of Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature and an editor of the prestigious US-based socialist journal Monthly Review (), was a featured speaker at Green Left Weekly’s April 11-13 Climate Change — Social Change conference in Sydney. He spoke to GLW’s Renfrey Clarke.

@question = Is humanity going to pull through this environmental crisis? If it is, what are the changes that are necessary?

Well, I think there are a couple of ways you could answer that question — one way would be that, as Noam Chomsky has answered it, it’s a question of optimism or pessimism, and in some way that’s a psychological issue.

NOBEL Peace Prize-winner Al Gore says there has been no improvement in the fight against climate change since his Oscar-winning film was released.

Speaking to The Sun, the former US vice-president said that the situation had got worse since his documentary An Inconvenient Truth hit cinemas in 2006.

“I have to say the situation has not improved since I made the movie in 2006,” Mr Gore told the paper.

The world’s largest tidal turbine, weighing 1000 tonnes, has been installed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough. The tidal turbine is rated at 1.2 megawatts, which is enough to power a thousand local homes.

The World Bank is not the same institution, but there’s the same kind of conflicts and confrontations going on. In Bolivia, one of the major background events that led to the uprising of the majority indigenous population to finally take political power was an effort by the World Bank to privatize water. Take an economics course, they’ll tell you that you ought to pay the market price and so on.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Nobel prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore launched a three-year, $300 million advocacy campaign calling for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

The “We” campaign by Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection will combine advertising and online organizing with grassroots groups.

Source: mike-servethepeople.blogspot

The Tibetan separatist movement is a creation of US imperialism. It is not a product of an “independent” Tibet having been overrun by “occupying” Chinese.

Oil spikes above $US107

From correspondents in New York | March 28, 2008

OIL prices leapt higher today as concerns about tight supplies were stoked by news that saboteurs had blown up an Iraqi export pipeline, traders said.

New York’s main oil contract, light sweet crude for delivery in May, rose $US1.68 to close at $US107.

By David Shukman
BBC environment correspondent, Midway

Plastic bag experiment (BBC/Mark Georgiou)
The team is testing how long it takes plastic to degrade in water
Plastic waste in the oceans poses a potentially devastating long-term toxic threat to the food chain, according to marine scientists.

Studies suggest billions of microscopic plastic fragments drifting underwater are concentrating pollutants like DDT.

Most attention has focused on dangers that visible items of plastic waste pose to seabirds and other wildlife.

Heavy fighting has continued for a third day between Shia militias and the Iraqi security forces in southern Iraq.

There are reports of extensive exchanges of fire between the Iraqi army and militiamen in Basra and in the town of Hilla, just south of Baghdad.

More than 70 people have died and hundreds have been injured in days of violence sparked by an Iraqi crackdown on Shia militias in Basra.

Source: Mercury

By GREG BARNS

March 24, 2008 12:00am

WHICH country’s interests are best served by an uprising in Tibet on the eve of the Beijing Olympics?

The USA’s, of course.

The Bush administration has long been frightened of China’s burgeoning rival superpower status, and US stoking of the Tibetan fires to provide maximum international embarrassment to China cannot be ruled out.

Tibet is a cause celebre for the Hollywood glitterati, pop stars and celebrity politicians.

By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News

Wilkins Ice Shelf from Twin Otter (Image: British Antarctic Survey)

Flyover of the breaking iceberg

A chunk of ice the size of the Isle of Man has started to break away from Antarctica in what scientists say is further evidence of a warming climate.

Satellite images suggest that part of the ice shelf is disintegrating, and will soon crumble away.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf has been stable for most of the last century, but began retreating in the 1990s.

Some glaciers in Europe have suffered significant losses
The rate at which some of the world’s glaciers are melting has more than doubled, data from the United Nations Environment Programme has shown.

Average glacial shrinkage has risen from 30 centimetres per year between 1980 and 1999, to 1.5 metres in 2006.

US investment bank Bear Stearns has had to be rescued from collapse by the US central bank.

But how serious is this development for the future of the banking system, and what does it say about the credit crunch?

How big is Bear Stearns?

Bear Stearns is one of the major US investment banks which have dominated Wall Street for generations.

Founded in 1923, it is one of the leading global banking firms that operates at the wholesale level, dealing with governments, companies and other financial institutions.