From futurist Stephan A. Schwartz - Trends That Will Affect Your Future …

[giovonni]

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

All of this results from willful ignorance. We chose to forget the lessons of the Great Depression: All banks and other financial institutions must be regulated, indeed require regulation to function properly. The events described in this story prove this.

MATT TAIBBI - Rolling Stone

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed ...

Read More - http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...620?print=true

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Human Corpses Are Prize in Global Drive for Profits


This trend cries out for regulation. I imagine what it would be like to have to answer. "What do you do?", someone would ask. "I make a profit from dismembering and selling corpses." I would have to reply.

The buying and selling of body parts is an industry that will only exist until organs can be grown. But even in this short time it has shown what happens when profit trumps all other considerations.

KATE WILLSON, VLAD LAVROV, MARTINA KELLER, THOMAS MAIER and GERARD RYLE - The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.

What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.

The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics.

RTI is one of a growing industry of companies that make profits by turning mortal remains into everything from dental implants to bladder slings to wrinkle cures.

The industry has flourished even as its practices ...

Read and view here - http://www.icij.org/human-corpses-ar...-drive-profits

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Neanderthals Ate Their Greens

Here is a wonderful new insight into the behavior of a distant forebearer. This story is fascinating, and the way researchers work out the insights are a true mystery story. The description we all learned -- that Neanderthals were primarily hunter meat eaters -- turns out to be deeply wrong.

MATT KAPLAN - Nature

Neanderthals have long been viewed as meat-eaters. The vision of them as inflexible carnivores has even been used to suggest that they went extinct around 25,000 years ago as a result of food scarcity, whereas omnivorous humans were able to survive. But evidence is mounting that plants were important to Neanderthal diets - and now a study reveals that those plants were roasted, and may have been used medicinally.

The finding comes from the El Sidrón Cave in northern Spain, where the roughly 50,000-year-old skeletal remains of at least 13 Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) have been discovered. Many of these individuals had calcified layers of plaque on their teeth. Karen Hardy, an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, wondered whether it might be possible to use this plaque to take a closer look at the Neanderthal menu.

Neanderthals were thought to eat only meat, but investigation ...

Read More - http://www.nature.com/news/neanderth...greens-1.11030

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How Much Money Does Your Cellphone Company Make From Selling Your Data to Police?



More on the surveillance trend. Now that it has been linked to profit expect it to grow and expand rapidly.

DAVID SYDIONGCO and WILL OREMUS - Slate

The nation’s wireless carriers spend a surprising amount of time and energy sharing their customers’ private data with police and the FBI. As we noted earlier this month, those companies fielded upwards of 1.3 million such requests in 2011 alone, dedicating hundreds of full-time employees to telling authorities what their customers were up to. And when asked by U.S. Rep. Ed Markey to disclose the extent of these surveillance programs, some of the companies said they are so busy handing out their users’ data that they don’t have time to keep track of how often they do it.

How can these companies afford all the time it takes to comply with these requests? (The numbers show that wireless companies grant a vast majority of the requests, even when there’s no warrant.) They can afford it, it seems, because the law enforcement agencies pay them. Your tax dollars at work!

Read More - http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...to_police.html

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Amish Population Booming in the U.S. With a new Settlement Founded Nearly Once a Month



The Amish are what the Founder's had in mind, I think, when they talked about religious freedom. They are a people who really do try to live as Christians, as they understand that. They cherish their differences, do not see themselves as victims, make no demands on others. And they are supported by the majority in their differentness. The contrast between the Amish and the "Christian" Right, I find quite striking.

NINA GOLGOWSKI - Mail (U.K.)

The Amish population is spreading faster than most other religious communities in the U.S. with a new settlement founded nearly once a month according to a new report.

With a population doubling in size approximately every 21 years, the census report by researchers at Ohio State University shows that more than 60 per cent of the current communities were founded after 1990.

'The Amish are one of the fastest-growing religious groups in North America,' Ohio State rural sociology professor Joe Donnermeyer who completed the census said in a statement. Here we come! The Amish population in the U.S. is spreading faster than most other religious communities with a new settlement founded nearly once a month

Here we come! The Amish population in the U.S. is spreading faster than most other religious communities with a new settlement founded nearly once a month

‘They're doubling their population about ...

Read More - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...rly-month.html

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Virtual Bacteria' Created by Scientists

Little by little we are unravelling the physical processes of life. This in itself is fascinating but, equally interesting, it is slowly revealing that consciousness is only partially physical and local.

NICK COLLINS, Science Correspondent - The Telegraph (U.K.)

The computer programme developed by researchers at Stanford University is an exact replica of the Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium, including its DNA and all the other components of its single cell.

The scientists hope that the simulation will help them explore the subtleties of how a cell works, unravel the genetic causes of disease, and predict how new therapies could prevent or treat illness.

Prof Markus Covert, who led the study published in the Cell journal, told the BBC: "The public hear about a new 'cancer gene' being discovered ... cancer is not a one-gene problem.

"There are thousands of factors interacting in very complicated ways and for us to understand a disease like that, we really need to start going back and trying to see if we can understand the whole cell."

To help understand the complexity of a cell Prof Covert and his team decided ...

Read More - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...cientists.html

[giovonni]

Oceans, Plants Help Put the Brakes on Global Warming, Study Finds

I guess this is good news: the earth is doing its best to keep climate change from changing the stability of existing systems. But human activity just keeps increasing the stress on those systems. Sadly, I don't see anything of consequence being done to help the earth.

ALISTER DOYLE - The Christian Science Monitor

OSLO, NORWAY -- Oceans and land have more than doubled the amount of greenhouse gases they absorb since 1960 in new evidence that nature is helping to brake global warming, a study showed on Wednesday.

Fundamental changes in seawater chemistry are occurring throughout the world's oceans. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from humankind's industrial and agricultural activities has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs almost a third of the CO2 we release into the atmosphere every year, so as atmospheric CO2 levels increase, so do the levels in the ocean. Initially, many scientists focused on the benefits of the ocean removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. However, decades of ocean observations now show that there is also a downside - the CO2 absorbed by the ocean is changing the chemistry of the seawater, a process ...

Read more here with short video -http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/201...dy-finds-video

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Be Wary of Talk About Privatizing the Post Office

Benjamin Franklin Deputy Post Master for the colonies understood in the 18th century the important role the postal system played in linking the country together. Nothing has changed. As I have written several times, as I travel around the U.S. I make a point of talking with postmasters and postmistresses, particularly in the small towns and villages that dot the nation from Alaska to Hawaii. To a person they have mourned this conservative project to turn the PO into a profit center for a few. Post Offices are the place where one catches up with friends, and hears the news of the community. Closing them literally tears the guts out of these little human pods of people. This report on what is going on is the best one I have come across. Tearing the PO apart will also have powerful impact on the growing schism that is arising in the U.S. An unintended consequence none of the proponents for this ill-conceived plan even seems to think about.

MICHAEL HILTZIK - Los Angeles Times

While thumbing through the household mail one recent day - a bill from the vet, a statement from the bank, 47 come-ons for low-interest credit cards and a birthday card from Grandma - I pondered the following riddle:

Why is it that the same conservatives who harped on how an obscure provision of the U.S. Constitution should have invalidated the healthcare reform act never talk about the provision that gives the federal government responsibility for postal service?

It's right there, at Article I, Section 8. Yet, in some quarters, talk of privatizing the post office never seems to ebb. That talk is experiencing another surge just now, because theU.S. Postal Service is in the process of defaulting on a payment of more than $5 billion owed to the Treasury.

Read More - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...2015318.column

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Fossil Discovery Rewrites the Story of Human Evolution


Here is more on the fast developing trend of research exploring our earliest ancestors -- such a fascinating story.

STEVE CONNOR - The Independent (U.K.)

The history of human evolution is more complex than previously supposed, according to fossils showing that several species of early man once lived cheek by jowl in the same region of East Africa.

Scientists have excavated three new fossils – a face and two jawbone fragments – indicating that at least two other species of human lived between 1.78m and 1.95m years ago at the same time as our direct ancestors. The discovery emphasises the complicated nature of human evolution, which has been likened to an intricate family tree of related species rather than a simple sequential line of direct descent.

The new fossils were found by a team led by Maeve Leakey of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi and belong to individuals who were markedly different from Homo erectus, which is believed to be the direct ancestor of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens...

Read More - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sc...n-8022722.html

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A New Kind of Visual News

This is an excellent account of the massive transition that is taking place in how the news is disseminated. We barely understand this transition, except that it is wholly dependent on the net, and phone systems. It seems to me this whole system is very fragile.


YouTube & News

From ~ Journalism.org

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake registering 9.0 on the Richter scale struck the coast of northeastern Japan, triggering a tsunami that would kill more than 18,000 people and leave an estimated $180 billion in damage. The news media worldwide provided extensive coverage of the disaster and its aftermath, but millions of people also turned to the web to learn about the event on the video sharing website YouTube. [1]

In the seven days following the disaster (March 11-18), the 20 most viewed news-related videos on YouTube all focused on the tragedy-and were viewed more than 96 million times.

What people saw in these videos also represented a new kind of visual journalism. Most of that footage was recorded by citizen eyewitnesses who found themselves caught in the tragedy. Some of that video was posted by the citizens themselves. Most of this citizen-footage, however, was ...

Read More - http://www.journalism.org/analysis_r...src=sdt-footer


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UCLA's New Transparent Solar Film Could be Game-changer

This is one of the game changing non-carbon based technologies which may save humanity. Particularly note the last paragraph of this story, which makes the point about decentralization that I have been writing about for over ten years.

DEAN KUIPERS - Los Angeles Times

One of the holy grails of solar cell technology may have been found, with researchers at UCLA announcing they have created a new organic polymer that produces electricity, is nearly transparent and is more durable and malleable than silicon.

The applications are mind-boggling. Windows that produce electricity. Buildings wrapped in transparent solar cells. Laptops and phones – or even cars or planes – whose outer coverings act as chargers. It might even be sprayed on as a liquid. The promise of cheap and easy-to-apply site-generated solar electricity might now be a lot closer to reality.

Of course, the idea of solar films and solar plastics is not new. The breakthrough to making a transparent film, however, came with isolating only one band of light in the spectrum.

'[A solar film] harvests light and turns it into electricity. In our case, we harvest only the infrared part,” says ...

Read More - http://www.latimes.com/news/local/en...,4271267.story

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Blind Mice Given Sight After Device Cracks Retinal Code


For at least some blind people at least a measure of vision may be only a few years away. Then, as part of the Homo Superiorus trend, nearsightedness and other visual problems will simply be resolved by being genetically engineered

JEANNA SMIALEK - Bloomberg

Blind mice had their vision restored with a device that helped diseased retinas send signals to the brain, according to a study that may lead to new prosthetic technology for millions of sight-impaired people.
Current devices are limited in the aid they provide to people with degenerative diseases of the retina, the part of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses to the brain. In research described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists cracked the code the retina uses to communicate with the brain.
Enlarge image Blind Mice See

Blind mice had their vision restored with a device that helped diseased retinas send signals to the brain. Above, a household mouse not part of the experiment. Photographer: Roger Jackman/Oxford Scientific

The technology moves prosthetics beyond bright light and high-contrast recognition and may be adopted for human use within a year or two, ...

Read More - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...inal-code.html

[giovonni]

Agri-Cube Grows Mass Quantities of Vegetables in a One-car Parking Spot

I think this has enormous potential. It would allow neighborhoods within cities, or villages to become largely food independent, without great land costs. Food is going to be an issue.

BRIAN DODSON - GizMag

Daiwa House, Japan's largest homebuilder, has introduced a line of prefabricated hydroponic vegetable factories, aimed at housing complexes, hotels, and top-end restaurants. Called the Agri-Cube, these units are touted by Daiwa as the first step in the industrialization of agriculture, to be located in and amongst the places where people live, work, and play.

More and more people desire sustainable, organic produce for their own use, and are turning to urban farming in an effort to insure the highest degree of freshness. However, some municipalities, neighborhoods, and homeowners associations have rules that effectively block such endeavors in areas under their sway. Add drought and pest control to the picture, and suddenly urban farming may seem more trouble than it is worth. There is a growing need for local supplies of freshly grown produce that avoids the difficulties presented by conventional small farms and gardens...

Read More - http://www.gizmag.com/prefab-garden-...x-daiwa/23607/

[giovonni]

Forget Electric Cars, This One Runs on Compressed Air

In January 2008 I published the first story on the Tata air car (See SR archives) and, as the project has developed, I have done others regularly. Here is the latest.

JOHN METCALFE - The Atlantic

Using compressed air to power cars is something people have experimented with since at least 1840. That's when two French men named Andraud and Tessie tested such a gaseous vehicle on a track. The eco-friendly automobile "worked well," reports the air-car lobby, which exists, "but the idea was not pursued further. "

Why not? Perhaps because making a practical, well-working model is damnably hard. But India's Tata Motors is pushing the technology forward, inch by inch, with its project to build "Airpods" – zero-pollution, cute-as-a-bug smartcars that zip along at 40 m.p.h. via the magic of squeezed air.

Sadly, these vehicles do not function by farting out a loud stream of gas that propels them forth. They instead are built with pneumatic motors that use pressurized air to drive pistons. In the case of Tata, a company that's developing a line of "nano" cars (including this bulletproof ...

Read More - http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...ssed-air/2967/


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Also in the news ...


MIT Develops New "Reverse Air Conditioner" Solar Power System for the Developing World

In the midst of the chaos of the crumbling American empire there are still wonderful bright spots of hope. This is one such. Like the piece I did yesterday about the Agri-Cube, this offers communities an alternative. These things are going to matter in the future.

DAVID SZONDY - Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Solar power would appear to be an obvious choice for the developing world, but as impoverished regions need systems that are simple, self-operating and cheap to build and maintain, this is generally not the case. The ability to provide heating in addition to electricity would also be beneficial because many communities need hot water has much as they need lights. An MIT team has developed a solution that meets these needs with a solar power system that is an air conditioner built backwards.

Mention of the developing world brings up images of deserts, jungles, veldts and other hot climates, but some poor regions lie in the temperate zone. In southern Africa, for example, it can get very cold in the winter time. MIT graduate Matthew Orosz noticed this while working for the Peace Corps in Lesotho where local clinics needed not only electricity, but access to hot water...

Read More - http://www.gizmag.com/solar-orc-reve...m_medium=email

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World's First Community-owned Tidal Turbine to Power up



Here is a very interesting new energy development model; one which many communities, including my own on Whidbey Island, could emulate.

Click Green

The world’s first community-owned tidal turbine will be made and deployed in Scotland, after a fabrication contract between Scottish firms Steel Engineering and Nova Innovation was announced by First Minister Alex Salmond.

During a visit that formed part of the Scottish Government’s Summer Cabinet programme in Renfrew, the First Minister confirmed that the two companies had reached agreement to manufacture a tidal turbine that will be connected to the grid and provide electricity to people in one of the most remote parts of Scotland.

The Nova-30 device, to be used by the North Yell community in Shetland to power a local ice plant and industrial estate, will be fabricated for Leith-based Nova Innovation Ltd in Steel Engineering’s newly expanded Renfrew facility. The new premises, which will help the firm meet its ambition to create 120 new jobs, were officially opened by the First Minister today...

Read More - http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/na...-scotland.html

[giovonni]

will share this here ...

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Cyborg tissue is half living cells, half electronics



They beat like real heart cells, but the rat cardiomyocytes in a dish at Harvard University are different in one crucial way. Snaking through them are wires and transistors that spy on each cell’s electrical impulses. In future, the wires might control their behaviour too.

Versions of this souped-up, "cyborg" tissue have been created for neurons, muscle and blood vessels. They could be used to test drugsMovie Camera or as the basis for more biological versions of existing implants such as pacemakers. If signals can also be sent to the cells, cyborg tissue could be used in prosthetics or to create tiny robots.

"It allows one to effectively blur the boundary between electronic, inorganic systems and organic, biological ones," says Charles Lieber, who leads the team behind the cyborg tissue.

Artificial tissue can already be grown on three-dimensional scaffolds made of biological materials that are not electrically active. And electrical components have been added to cultured tissue before, but not integrated into its structure, so they were only able to glean information from the surface.


Bio-scaffolds go electric


Bioengineers at Harvard University have created the first examples of cyborg tissue: Neurons, heart cells, muscle, and blood vessels that are interwoven by nanowires and transistors.

Electrically inflamed

Lieber’s team combined these strands of work to create electrically active scaffolds. They created 3D networks of conductive nanowires studded with silicon sensors. Crucially, the wires had to be flexible and extremely small, to avoid impeding the growth of tissue. The scaffold also contained traditional biological materials such as collagen.

The researchers were able to grow rat neurons, heart cells and muscle in these hybrid meshes. In the case of the heart cells, they started to contract just like normal cells, and the researchers used the network to read out the rate of the beats.

When they added a drug that stimulates heart cell contraction, they detected an increase in the rate, indicating the tissue was behaving like normal and that the network could sense such changes.

Lieber’s team also managed to grow an entire blood vessel about 1.5 centimetres long from human cells, with wires snaking through it. By recording electrical signals from inside and outside the vessel– something that was never possible before– the team was able to detect electrical patterns that they say could give clues to inflammation, whether tissue has undergone changes that make it prone to tumour formation or suggest impending heart disease.

Commanding cells

"You could use these things to directly measure the effects of drugs in synthetically grown human tissue without ever having to test them in an actual human being," says Lieber's colleague Daniel Kohane. He also envisions tissue patches that could be added to the surface of a heart, say, to monitor for problems.

Vladimir Parpura, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who was not involved in the study, suggests using the tissue to build tiny, biomimetic robots or implants that repair damaged tissue via electronic pulses.

So far, though, the researchers have only used the electrical scaffolds to record signals– they have yet to feed commands to cells. So Lieber's next step is to add components to the nanoscaffold that could "talk" to neurons. He says the goal is to "wire up tissue and communicate with it in the same way a biological system does".

Source: http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=21425

Original Source:http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ef=online-news

Also related ...

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAx8QUaKG18

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAx8Q...layer_embedded

[giovonni]

Germany Rethinks Path to Green Future

I find it very instructive to follow the Germans as they do what we should have been doing over the past decade, but have failed to do -- converting to non-carbon based energy. As I predicted about the transition, once it starts in a country, with even the most modest support, it goes much faster than projected.

STEFAN SCHULTZ - Der Spiegel (Germany)

BREMERHAVEN -- Germany's energy revolution is the government's only major project -- but the problems keep piling up. The pace of grid expansion is sluggish, and electricity costs for consumers are rising. The environment minister wants to fundamentally alter the way green energy is subsidized, but will it mean putting the brakes on the entire project?

The cornerstones of Germany's energy turn-around can be admired in a hall in the northern port city of Bremerhaven. Standing on three rust-brown feet apiece, each of these immense, yellow-painted trunks weighs as much as 900 elephants. Soon, special ships will come and sink these steel monsters into the seabed, where they will support the wind turbines that are supposed to supply the country with green electricity.

Before they do, Environment Minister Peter Altmaier will go to Bremerhaven to inspect the work of Weser Wind and Areva Wind, the companies building them. ...

Read More - http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-852815.html

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Top universities branch into free online courses...


This is very good news. It is in the national interest to educate as many people as want to be educated, as far as they want to go, particularly if it falls within the STEM domain -- Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- basically the fact based world. Of equal importance though is that it be compassionate and life-affirming, with policies based on data, not only because it is ethically right, but because it will be the least painful, most efficient, least expensive, and quickest way through. Programs such as these could make a lot of difference.

The Christian Science Monitor/The Raw Story

As the school year revs up, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Anant Agarwal looks forward to teaching his most popular class. Last semester, Circuits and Electronics welcomed in 154,000 students – 35 times as many as the entire undergraduate enrollment at MIT.

The class kicked off MIT's new push into online learning. It was the inaugural course of edX, a collaboration with Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, to offer top-notch education free of charge to anyone with Internet access.

"If you took the online class, the material would be identical" to the on-campus version, says Mr. Agarwal, president of edX and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "It was the same level of difficulty. They took the same exams." Students even received grades, just not academic credit.

This fall, edX will offer seven courses ranging from computer science to public health. ...

Read More - http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/0...nline-courses/

[giovonni]

Debt Collectors Cashing In on Student Loans

This business of beggaring students and then hounding them forever is, as this article describes, a short term rain of money for a few special interest corporations. For the country as a whole, however, it is a disaster. Making it harder and harder and more and more expensive to get a college education is not in the national interest.

You cannot have a modern competitive national economy when you discourage students from seeking to improve themselves through education. Each year we have been falling further and further behind, and it is increasingly difficult to be upwardly mobile in the U.S.. These developments suggest this downward trend is going to continue.

There is a secondary issue, foreign nations are sending -- and paying to send -- their children to American universities which are still world class. Then these young graduates, unburdened by debt, take their education and go home to increase the national wellness of their native countries with their newly learned skills.

Reader Supported News

Most US college students hope to land a good job with a high salary after graduation. But for some the reality is very different. Many find themselves faced with insurmountable debt - and a loan industry that's happy to cash in on their misfortune.

­As the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has soared, so has the number of borrowers who have fallen behind in making payments.

Around 5.9 million people nationwide have fallen at least 12 months behind in their payments. This number has grown by a third in the last five years, according to a State Higher Education Finance survey.

Many who can't repay their loans feel they have no choice but to default. It's a decision that can be disastrous - ruining a borrower's credit and increasing the amount they owe. It can also result in penalties of up to 25 per ...

Read More - http://www.readersupportednews.org/n...-student-loans

[giovonni]

Nation Rich in Land Draws Workers From One Rich in People

This is a very significant trend, particularly in the light of climate change. An emerging trend with long term implications and, if it continues, it will become more important year by year. See it in the context of the emerging multipolar geopolitical reality that is replacing the bipolar world -- the USSR and the USA -- that most of us grew up in. The linkage of China and Russia, of which this is a first fresh sprout is a major event.

It is also interesting to see the same patterns playing out there that we have seen with the immigration of workers into the U.S.

ANDREW E. KRAMER - The New York Times

OSTANINO, Russia - When a Chinese investor bought a farm outside this village a few years back, he was pleased enough to name it Golden Land. The soil was rich, the sunshine and rain bountiful.

The land, deep in rural Russia, was also largely devoid of people.

No more. Today, row upon row of greenhouses here teem with dozens of Chinese farmhands picking tomatoes. And in a season with a bumper crop of tomatoes, the foreman said he would happily have employed hundreds more.

The influx of Chinese farm labor in Russia reflects the growing trade and economic ties between the two countries, one rich in land and resources, the other in people.

For years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, both countries have struggled to convert these complementary strengths into real business opportunities. A few mining ventures are succeeding. And state companies have ...

Read More - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/bu...ewanted=1&_r=3

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Dollar No Longer Primary Oil Currency as China Begins to Sell Oil Using Yuan

This is a huge deal, and it has implications that will affect the U.S. as a nation and each citizen personally. Part of America's economic primacy is based on the fact that the dollar is the reference currency. If we get in a jam we can print more dollars. If other countries get in a jam they can print more currency but, since their currency is referenced to the dollar the effect is not positive. More than that the Chinese have linked the Yuan to oil, breaking the iron clad deal Kissinger made with the house of Saud that oil would be traded only in dollars.

KENNETH SCHORTGEN JR - San Francisco Examiner

On Sept. 11, Pastor Lindsey Williams, former minister to the global oil companies during the building of the Alaskan pipeline, announced the most significant event to affect the U.S. dollar since its inception as a currency. For the first time since the 1970's, when Henry Kissenger forged a trade agreement with the Royal house of Saud to sell oil using only U.S. dollars, China announced its intention to bypass the dollar for global oil customers and began selling the commodity using their own currency.

Lindsey Williams: "The most significant day in the history of the American dollar, since its inception, happened on Thursday, Sept. 6. On that day, something took place that is going to affect your life, your family, your dinner table more than you can possibly imagine."

"On Thursday, Sept. 6... just a few days ago, China made ...

Read More -http://www.examiner.com/article/doll...oil-using-yuan

[giovonni]

The Rush to Exploit an Increasingly Ice-free Arctic

This was inevitable, and speaks volumes about how psychotic we have become about profit. The Bible is right.

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - Matthew 6:19-21,24 (KJV)

When you worship Mammon bad things happen though, because by emphasizing profit above all, it emphasizes the individual interest as being superior to all other interests, and it destroys the sense of interconnectedness and interdependence of all life that is the essence of the biosphere. The exploitation of the arctic will result in grave harm to an ecosystem not structured to include humans, and this will boomerang against us. That is my prediction.

SCOTT K. JOHNSON - arstechnica

It’s that time of year again, when we check in to see where the annual Arctic sea ice minimum will end up. And this year is a doozie. We haven’t quite bottomed out at the end of the melt season, yet, but already 2012 has set new records for smallest Arctic sea ice extent and volume, smashing through the numbers from 2007. Records are often attention-grabbing and "exciting," in a way, but while Usain Bolt’s incredible shrinking 100-meter dash time may be uplifting, shrinking sea ice is not.

Every time a new sea ice extent record is broken, the same question comes up: how long until it’s gone? That is, how long will it be before the Arctic Ocean is functionally ice-free in the summer, legitimately opening the once-fabled Northwest Passage?

The fact is, we don’t know. Climate models continue to underestimate the rate of sea ice loss ...

Read More - http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/...e-free-arctic/