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GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS

NEW ***** The Richard Dimbleby Lecture by HRH Prince Charles, titled “Facing the Future”
St James’s Palace State Apartments, London, 7th July 2009 - An Exceptional In-Depth Holistic Call to Wake Up and Act Before It Is Too Late
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Imaging Life

Obama's half brother describes abuse by their father
Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, in Guangzhou, China, promotes "Nairobi to Shenzhen," which he says he wrote in part to exorcise the bad memories of his childhood.
Los Angeles Times - By Barbara Demick - November 5, 2009
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Reporting from Beijing - He is younger and sports close-cropped hair and a gold stud in his left earlobe, but the slim build, the loping gait and the high-set cheekbones give him a striking resemblance to his more famous half brother, President Obama.

Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, a 43-year-old businessman and musician, has lived in southern China for seven years, the last one assiduously attempting to avoid publicity. But he broke his silence Wednesday, making a public appearance to publicize an autobiographical novel.

The self-published "Nairobi to Shenzhen" follows Ndesandjo's peripatetic life. He was born in Kenya to Barack Obama Sr., the president's father, and his third wife, Ruth Nidesand, the daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. The couple later divorced and Ndesandjo moved to the United States, earning degrees in physics from Brown University and Stanford and an MBA from Emory University. He was married last year to a Chinese woman from Henan province.

As with the president's best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Ndesandjo's book delves into growing up as a mixed-race child and into a psyche shaped by an erratic father.

Opinion | The real reason Obama is not making much progress
Before you can appeal to America's voters you have to appeal to the corporations
The Independent - By Johann Hari - Friday, November 2, 2009
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Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush – such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras – many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?
A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues – Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties – have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

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Carrumpah-Lobo - The Homosapiens.ki Blog
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International
United States

United Nations - Climate Change | Industrialized Nations Unveil Plans to Rein in Emissions
The New York Times - By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Neil MacFarquehar - November 19, 2009
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With less than three weeks remaining before negotiators gather in Copenhagen to hammer out a global response to climate change, a rapid-fire succession of countries are unveiling national plans that serve as opening bids for reining in heat-trapping emissions.

“The list of what is on the table is rather long,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting, which runs from Dec. 7 to 18 in Copenhagen. But, speaking at the United Nations headquarters on Thursday, he seized on the latest pledges to take aim at the United States, which has not yet played its hand. “We now have offers of targets from all industrialized countries except the United States,” Mr. de Boer said. He emphasized that he was looking to the United States for “a numerical midterm target and commitment to financial support.” “This is essential, and I believe this can be done,” he said.

Canada | Conservatives shoot the messenger over torture allegations
National Post - By Don Martin - November 19, 2009
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OTTAWA — In an organized smackdown rarely seen in Ottawa, the government turned inward on Thursday to attack a new enemy in its Afghanistan conflict — senior Washington embassy intelligence officer Richard Colvin. After 15 years of steadily rising through the foreign service ranks, Mr. Colvin now stands accused of being a Taliban stooge, someone so easily duped by torture complaints that he shredded his diplomatic reputation by passing along their accusations.

Mr. Colvin became fodder for such accusations the minute he told MPs that a full year of warnings about detainee torture had been ignored at the highest levels of the military and public service. He even hinted at tentative, but unproven, connections to the government itself. That made his testimony very, very dangerous — and that’s why the Conservatives have launched a campaign to discredit Mr. Colvin. But it faces a big problem. Every action by this government to date has only enhanced the diplomat’s credibility.

Salam Fayyad builds Palestine
Jerusalem Post - By David Hor owitz - November 19, 2009
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Steadily and methodically, the PA prime minister is putting together the central constituents of Palestinian statehood. Steadily and methodically, too, he is gathering international support for statehood - not solely from the automatic backers of a sovereign Palestine, but also from the nations most committed to Israel's well-being, notably the United States.

The Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
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Climate Change

Climate change survey says 83% willing to make sacrifices
The Independent - By Peter Woodman, Press Association - November 20, 2009
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More than 80 per cent of people believe climate change is a serious threat and are willing to make sacrifices to combat it, a survey by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) showed today. Just 17 per cent of the 1,000 people polled were not prepared to change their travel habits to tackle the climate change problem. Of the rest, all thought that climate change was either a serious or very serious threat to the British way of life.

The poll found:

9 per cent were prepared to make significant changes to their travel habits, such as getting rid of their car altogether or cutting out air travel completely; 38 per cent were happy to make moderate changes, such as investing in a green car, starting a car-share scheme or limiting air travel; 36 per cent would make minimal changes, such as taking public transport or riding a bike more often.

The survey coincided with the release of the ICE's report, State of the Nation - Low Carbon Infrastructure, which explained why infrastructure, alongside behaviour change and political action is fundamental to creating a low-carbon society. The report concluded that to meet ambitious carbon targets, new and existing transport, energy, waste and water networks needed to be adapted and developed to minimise emissions and highlighted the role this infrastructure had to play in changing individual and collective behaviours.

Communities and Species

US | Five cities that will rise in the New Economy
From Seattle to Huntsville, Ala., five cities are poised to prosper in the New Economy because of exports, innovation, clean technology, and healthcare.
Christian Science Monitor - By Ron Scherer - November 20, 2009
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Fort Collins, Colo.- In Houston, the Texas Medical Center is expanding so quickly that it will soon become the seventh largest downtown in the US. By itself. The hospital complex brims with restaurants, shops, and hotels, and employs 100,000 people – the population of Billings, Mont.
In Seattle, the erector-set cranes along the waterfront and big forklifts at the airport are loading exports into containers with the constancy of a piston: plywood to Beijing, halibut and crab to Tokyo, Granny Smith apples to Moscow. Last year, Washington was the only state to ship more goods to China than it receives.

Global | The world’s next boom cities

In an age of global commerce and culture, boom cities include Shanghai, China, and Mumbai as well as Istanbul, Turkey, and São Paulo, Brazil.
Christian Science Monitor - By Ben Quinn , Correspondent - November 20, 2009
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London - If the last century was the age of economic globalization, expect the first half of this one to be the era of urbanization. By 2050, 3 out of 4 people will be concentrated in major cities or massively urbanized regions, many of them climate-change refugees from exposed agricultural areas.
But as nations recover from the biggest shock to the global financial system since the Great Depression, a shift in economic power is already ensuring the next generation of truly great world cities will have a particularly Chinese and Indian feel. Straw polls of urbanologists inevitably throw in Shanghai and Mumbai (Bombay) as rising stars among a list of Asian cities expanding at a phenomenal pace. Others include names generally unheard-of to the average Westerner. The southern Chinese city of Beihai, for example, has been identified as the world’s fastest-growing metropolis, followed by the northern Indian city of Ghaziabad.

Economic factors are key to the shifts, of course, a reality that will help sustain Tokyo’s significance, aided by the development of green technology. But other forces are important, too. “With Chinese cities, very clear and strong governance structures mean there is a clarity when it comes to their development,” says Malcolm Smith, an urban designer at Arup, a global consulting firm, who worked on what the Chinese billed as the world’s first low-carbon “eco city,” near Shanghai.

While Shanghai and India’s Mumbai are both economic powerhouses rather than political capitals, the same forces are propelling the rise of another city on the other side of the world, São Paulo, Brazil. A classic “second” city formed by Brazil’s industrial explosion, São Paulo is now the largest city in the world’s 10th largest economy. In Latin America, experts suggest it is eclipsed – in size as well as cultural and political clout – only by Mexico City, despite all the chronic urban problems in the Mexican capital, now home to 18 million people.

US | New Economy cities: A Seattle slew of advantages
With a vibrant entrepreneurial climate and deep pool of venture capital, Seattle capitalizes on high-tech, exports, and world health.
Christian Science Monitor - By Dean Paton, Correspondent - November 20, 2009
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Seattle - In some ways, Seattle is the prototype city of the future. It embodies in one leafy landscape virtually all of the forces driving the New Economy – exports, an educated workforce, a vibrant high-tech base, a budding green-tech sector, and an enviable lifestyle. One usually overlooked characteristic is how dependent it is on foreign trade. The flow of exports out of Puget Sound runs at about twice the national average. It now accounts for 1 in 3 jobs in the area.

“Look,” says Sam Kaplan of the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle, “our big companies are very internationally oriented. More than 70 percent of Boeing’s sales are overseas, and 60 percent of Microsoft’s sales are overseas.” That has paid off. Seattle has been growing at about twice the rate of the national economy since 2003, says Dick Conway, who publishes The Puget Sound Economic Forecaster.

Yet Seattle has more going for it than just 737s headed for Asian hangars. Experts say the city also benefits from a vibrant entrepreneurial climate, a deep pool of venture capitalists, and a genial tradition of collaboration. “We recruit not only from here, but from other places, too,” says Jeremy Lewis, president and CEO of Big Fish Games, a digital-media company. “So it’s not just a place where creative people are, but a place where creative people want to come.”

It helps that King County is home to as many as 68,000 millionaires, many of whom have stepped naturally into a tradition of risk-taking. “We have more business start-ups than any other state in the country,” says Steve Gerritson of enterpriseSeattle, a nonprofit business development group. Part of the reason is the University of Washington, a research-money magnet, that has developed and patented hundreds of ideas. Many of them have migrated into the local private sector, pulling venture capitalists and top researchers into partnerships that continually fuel the entrepreneurial culture.

Yet Seattle also has become a world leader in a nonprofit “industry” that promises to create thousands of research-and-delivery jobs. Much more than simply the well-funded projects of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this new sector of the Northwest economy now accounts for about 180 organizations focused on global health. “Outside Geneva, Switzerland, where the World Health Organization is headquartered, it’s Seattle that is the center of global health,” says Lisa Cohen, director of the Washington Global Health Alliance. “When you look at the growth projections of these organizations, almost all of them are planning to double or triple in size during the next five years.”

Corporate Crime and Government - The Linkage

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
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Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
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OECD warns Britain risks 'debt spiral'
The Telegraph - By Edmund Conway - November 19, 2009
Britain is at growing risk of a "public debt spiral" unless the Government takes "drastic" action to cut the deficit, according to the OECD, world's leading economic institution.
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Global | The jobless recovery is on the way, says OECD
But public borrowing reached £11.42bn last month Figure was highest for the October since records began
The Indeendent - By Sean O'Grady, Economics Editor - Friday, November 20, 2009
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The spectre of a global "jobless recovery" was conjured up yesterday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which predicted that "the economic recovery now spreading across OECD countries is still too timid to halt the continuing rise in unemployment".

The warning came as the latest evidence on the supply of credit to the British economy showed little sign of radical improvements. The Bank of England's Trends In Lending Report confirmed that British consumers were still paying off their credit card and other consumer debts, while lending to businesses fell across all the main sectors of the economy in the third quarter of the year. The OECD's latest Economic Outlook also said Britain's public finances were weak and required "concrete" plans to bring the deficit under control.

Global warming and Climate Change

India tells West to stop eating beef
India has urged the West to give up eating beef to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
The Telegraph - By Dean Nelson in New Delhi - November 20, 2009
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The environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said if the world abandoned beef consumption, emissions would be dramatically reduced and global warming would slow down. "The solution to cut emissions is to stop eating beef. It leads to emission of methane which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide," he said.

El Niño intensifies Latin American drought
The Telegraph - November 20, 2009
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From a devastating food crisis in Guatemala to water cuts in Venezuela, El Niño has compounded drought damage across Latin America this year. From a devastating food crisis in Guatemala to water cuts in Venezuela, El Niño has compounded drought damage across Latin America this year. The occasional seasonal warming of central and eastern Pacific waters upsets normal weather patterns across the globe and occurs on average every two to five years.

Typically lasting around 12 months, El Niño reappeared once again in June. Guatemalan authorities blamed it for the nation's worst drought in 30 years, which has left almost 500 people dead from hunger since the start of the year. Around 36,000 hectares (90,000 acres) of corn and bean crops were lost, officials said. "El Nino prolonged the period of drought, which provoked a reduction... in agricultural production, affecting around 2.5 million people," said Elisabeth Byrsla, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Dutch construct dunes against rising seas
The Telegraph - By Alix Rijckaert, in Monster - November 2009
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On the beach at Monster, bulldozers painstakingly turn sand dredged from the bottom of the North Sea bed into dunes in an ambitious effort to safeguard the Netherlands from flooding. Stretching more than 20 kilometres (15 miles) southwards from The Hague, the project is one of many in a battle against rising sea levels. "Because it is a low-lying delta, the Netherlands is very sensitive to climate change," Tineke Huizinga, the water management deputy minister, said on a recent visit to the bustling work site. "If sea and river levels rise, the Netherlands will be under threat," Huizinga said, walking in yellow boots along a pipeline of several hundred metres spewing out dredged sand. "Fortunately, the coast is safe today, but we are investing in the security of people who will live here in 50 years."

Legal and Constitutional Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
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Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
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Palaeontology | Scientists unearth 'supercroc' that dined on dinosaurs
Palaentologists uncover five new crocodile species in Sahara
The Independent - By Steve Connor, Science Editor - Friday, November 20, 2009
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A graveyard of ancient crocodiles has revealed that the world was once home to a veritable menagerie of crocs of various sizes, shapes and fearsome forms. They ranged from a dog-like crocodile to a supercroc that was so big it dined on dinosaurs.

Palaeontologists have unearthed five new crocodile species that lived with the dinosaurs about 100 million years ago until they too became extinct about 64 million years ago. Professor Paul Sereno of Chicago University and his colleagues discovered the dinosaurs while excavating remote sites in the Sahara desert, which was once part of the ancient southern continent of Gondwana and enjoyed a warm, moist climate similar to present-day Florida.

Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
- Slide Show / Audio

Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime”
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

The Internet Press Room

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Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
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