Why the revolution will not be tweeted, by Malcolm Gladwell. "Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools."

A look at the daily life of the President and how it has changed over time. "Inside the West Wing, the author [Todd Purdum] talks to Obama’s top advisers about the challenge of playing the Washington game, ugly as it has become, even while their boss insists they find a way to transcend it."

"Mr Baffa [one of the first Nigerian civil servants to replace the British] remembers that “the purpose was to train us to become administrative officers in the field, to take over from the British officers. And everything we learnt was in the spirit of the British officers, to believe at all times that you are doing the right thing. If at any time you thought it was not right, don’t do it."

"Going where the politicians seem to fear to tread, Michael Blastland asks some of the UK's most influential policy experts and politicians how the difficult decisions on what to cut should be reached. He demands hard data on which activities should be curbed or abandoned altogether and how the sums will match the rhetoric."

From Harper's Magazine, April 1997.<br />

Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that.

"As with oil, it’s possible to envisage ‘peak food’ (the point of maximum production, followed by decline), ‘peak phosphorus’, i.e. the high point in the use of phosphate fertiliser (one estimate puts it at 2035), and, as the FAO suggests in its diplomatic way, ‘peak land’: the point at which the total area of the world’s most productive land begins to diminish (soil exhaustion, climate change) and marginal land comes up for reassessment."

"Type in the name of a COMPANY, your LAWMAKER, or a prominent INDIVIDUAL, and see how they're influencing the political system."

Profile of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. "Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution."

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells: "In a nutshell, it is that too much debt is always dangerous. It’s dangerous when a government borrows heavily from foreigners—but it’s equally dangerous when a government borrows heavily from its own citizens. It’s dangerous, too, when the private sector borrows heavily, whether from foreigners or from itself—for banks are basically institutions that borrow from their depositors, then make loans to others, and banking crises are among the most devastating shocks an economy can face."

Commentary by Jeremy Bernstein, the comments are also worth reading.

"Can mobile phones make a miracle?"

David Miliband on Afghanistan.

"Ethiopia is only one of 20 or more African countries where land is being bought or leased for intensive agriculture on an immense scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era. ... It is not known if the acquisitions will improve or worsen food security in Africa, or if they will stimulate separatist conflicts, but a major World Bank report due to be published this month is expected to warn of both the potential benefits and the immense dangers they represent to people and nature."

Written 11 March 2010. The final paragraph: "Whether [the health care reform bill] passes or not, the institutional pressures of big money have effectively and quietly deformed central parts of the bill and continue to loom over any attempt by Congress to write and pass major domestic legislation. Stronger financial regulation is now being resisted daily by Wall Street lobbies. It's not a coincidence that there have been fewer and fewer pieces of large-scale economic and social legislation since big money has increasingly dominated politics from the 1980s on. The question that remains open is whether there is any effective way of revealing what is being bought and sold in Congress."

Consumer orientated overview of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from NYT.

Profile of Paul Krugman.

"The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or from new and more efficient competitors in the private sector who might have the audacity to offer a better product at a better price."

"The World Cup, it is everywhere said, will market South Africa around the world, create jobs and be highly beneficial to the country’s development. In fact, it will be very much for the delectation of the well-off. At least in ancient Rome the poor got to see the chariot races and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here."

On the state of water in Cyprus.

Review of "The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House". "Clinton doesn’t do introspection: his obsessive, almost prurient interest in other people is partly there to prevent him having to think too hard about himself." All pretty interesting including Runciman's thoughts on Clinton's presidency.

"Food Fighter, Does Whole Foods’ C.E.O. know what’s best for you?" Profile of John Mackey.

Interesting, detailed investigative journalism about Aafia Siddiqui, a woman who may or may not have been detained by the CIA in Pakistan.

What really happened during the Israeli attacks? by Lawrence Wright.

Reviews of "A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies" and Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto". Toward the end... "All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world."

"Bruce German. A food chemist at U.C. Davis, German realized early in his career that if he could determine what a food perfectly suited to our DNA looked like, he would have a Rosetta Stone with which to solve the puzzle of dietary well-being. He would be able to examine each molecular component of this food to understand what it was doing to make people healthy. No plant would do as a model, since evolutionary pressure tends to favor plants that can avoid being eaten. The model food would be just the opposite: something that had evolved specifically to be a meal, something shaped by constant Darwinian selection to satisfy all the dietary needs of mammals. That Ur-food, of course, is milk."

"In December and early January, the photographer Nadav Kander shot 52 portraits of Barack Obama's top advisers, aides and members of his incoming administration. Kander and the Time Magazine's director of photography, Kathy Ryan, discuss putting those portrait sessions together and what happened behind the scenes."

Without public investment, the food crisis will only get worse

Obama meets Bartlet.

Polls, polls and more polls. Now if only I could motivate myself to study them...

Cyclists, drivers and pedestrians all break the laws of the road. Sometimes in the same way, other times differently. Why and what can be done? Thie post has many interesting points and plenty of links to follow.

The series will explore the facts and the myths surrounding the debate and the implications for food production in the future.

"Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as 'an emergency internal security database system' designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law."

"He's the man who makes Obama run..."

"It's also unwise to underestimate the hunger of the media for an exciting race. If Obama emerges as a big front runner, it's a good bet that the press will air more of McCain's attacks."

This just seems the way to do it after reading Joe Trippi's The Revolution will not be Televised. But I'm non-US so no money from me. Oh well...

"Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, an international coalition intervened in Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power and effectively saved the Hazaras from ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Taliban."

"best-known for his influential views on population growth. He famously emphasised the potential for populations to rise steeply."

"There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before."

"We may look back at the second half of the last century as an era of cheap food. It'll be like the Hundred Years' War, as we were taught it in school: a seminal moment in human history that's gone and will not return."

In "Tajikistan, where temperatures have risen and glaciers are melting - causing floods, pollution, disease and landslides." All this is also causing political unrest between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

UK newspaper articles tagged on author and subject axes. Track journalists, hound journalists, feel empowered? Open source too.

"Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the United Nations. Proposals for draconian new laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist."

"... Swiss People's Party (SVP), the far-right movement tipped to win the elections later this month following a campaign denounced as overtly racist by a United Nations watchdog."

Forgot to bookmark this ages ago!

"... dedicated to chronicling and resisting corporate attacks on democracy, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment."

Great talk and interesting stats

TED talk by James Nachtwey. Includes a high res version.

"Devolution has not brought Scotland's separation. Nor has it brought confidence, self-reliance or a new Scottish Enlightenment"

"Many nations have prospered after gaining independence from their neighbours. Why should the Scots be different?"

.. the recording industry is trying to extend the copyright protection of sound recordings from the current 50 year term to life plus 70 years, just as in copyright for compositions.

This is a study of TV new coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of how this coverage relates to the understanding, beliefs and attitudes of the television audience.