Well, this week seemed a bit less crazy than the preceding ones. No hostages taken to promote a green agenda and no Qu’ran burning by wacky mustached guys. Still there some interesting items did pop up.
The Nation says Monsanto used Blackwater for “Black Ops”
The Nation magazine reports it has obtained documents that it says link Blackwater (now Xe Services), a private security firm,to a number of government organizations and multinational companies. Contracts were through two companies: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC); companies owned and directed by Blackwater’s owner and founder, Erik Prince.
One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.
Monsanto denies any illicit activities stating that all intelligence “was developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information.”
According to a statement by Monsanto,
Monsanto did not hire Blackwater nor did we approve of the firm infiltrating any groups as was suggested in the Nation article. In 2008, 2009 and early 2010, a firm called Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS) provided Monsanto’s security group with reports about activities or groups that could pose a risk to the company, its personnel or its global operations. The safety of our people is our utmost priority and we value the communities in which we operate. All information provided by TIS was developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning internet blogs and websites. Prior to retaining TIS, Monsanto specifically enquired about and was informed that TIS was a completely separate entity from Blackwater. Beyond the content of the Nation article, we have not engaged people to infiltrate firms/activist groups and we do not condone that type of behavior.
The number of people chronically hungry down nearly 100 million
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports, “the new estimate of the number of people who will suffer chronic hunger this year is 925 million — 98 million down from 1.023 billion in 2009. These figures come from The State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI) report which will be jointly published by FAO and United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The FAO and WFP hope to speed progress towards achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the first of which is to end poverty and hunger.
“[W]ith a child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment related problems, hunger remains the world’s largest tragedy and scandal,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “This is absolutely unacceptable.”
Matthew Berger points out that, “Ten years after setting the goal of halving the proportion of people suffering from poverty and hunger by 2015, only mixed success can be found for the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)…Oxfam America pointed out in a report that this decrease means that the proportion of the world’s hungry has gone down by only half a percentage point since 2000 – from 14 to 13.5 percent.”
Deepwater Horizon oil spill may not be as bad as feared
According to the New York Times, “[E]vidence is increasing that through a combination of luck (a fortunate shift in ocean currents that kept much of the oil away from shore) and
ecological circumstance (the relatively warm waters that increased the
breakdown rate of the oil), the gulf region appears to have escaped the
direst predictions of the spring. ”
Civil wars not linked to global warming
“THE idea that global warming will increase the incidence of civil
conflict in Africa is wrong,”reports New Scientist. “What’s more, the
researchers who previously made the claim now concede that civil
conflict has been on the wane in Africa since 2002, as prosperity has
increased. If the trend continues, a more peaceful future may be in
store.”
The report, Climate not to blame for African civil wars, concludes that climate variability is a poor predictor of armed conflict. Instead, African civil wars can
be explained by generic structural and contextual conditions: prevalent
ethno-political exclusion, poor national economy, and the collapse of the Cold War system.”
Poland state logs a “primary forest”
Bernard Osser of the AFP news service reported on what ecologists say is “illicit logging” in “the ancient Bialowieza forest in eastern Poland.”
“Some of the trees have been cut down illegally by Poland’s National Forests service, in violation of European Union legislation,” contends Polish environmentalist Adam Bohdan, who with other campaigners has raised the alarm in Warsaw and Brussels…
“We are also ecologists,” says Andrzej Antczak, head of the Bialowieza forest service. “We log only to protect the forest from bark beetles–insects that pose a grave danger to trees. We want to help nature defend itself and we do it according to Polish legislation.”
Pacific sockeye salmon returned to spawn in record numbers
Terr Daily reports, “After years of scarcity, the rivers of the US and
Canadian Pacific Northwest are running red, literally, with a vast swarm
of a salmon species considered to be in crisis.”
In other fishy news…
Atlantic cod pulling back from the brink
According to the World Wildlife Fund in Canada, “New fisheries data suggest that after a 16 year moratorium, Atlantic cod on the southern Grand Banks have increased by 69 percent since the last assessment in 2007. While this cod stock is still near historic lows, a significant increase in the number of spawning fish is good news for the future of this once major fishery.”
(H/T Great News Network)
Nullius in Verba 