The Mexican President has promised to intervene to cut the price of maize flour after the price of the tortilla, staple food of the Mexican poor, jumped dramatically.
Radio 4 was reporting this morning that this was being attributed to increased direction of maize to the production of ethanol … one more reason why this isn’t really a “green” answer for transport, except perhaps on a local scale with otherwise unused materials.
Reported in the Independent today, the short life and brutal death of a 19-year-old Pakistani bride, Sabia Rani, transported from her rural village (where she’d had a few scant years of education) to 21st-century Britain, then brutally beaten to death, in a household with eight of her in-laws, for being unable to live up to her husband’s expectations about make-up, sandwiches and going to the supermarket.
When a “holy man” confirmed she was “possessed by evil spirits”, through touching an item of her clothing, that probably sealed her fate.
Khan told his work supervisor that he was unhappy with his marriage because he had been rushed into it, and soon began kicking and beating his wife.
Leeds Crown Court heard that Ms Rani’s injuries, similar to those of a car crash victim, were so severe that she would have been in constant pain and ill for at least three weeks before she died.
Yet Khan’s sister said she had seen no evidence of injuries. She and Ms Rani had been great friends, she said.
Much is made of the difference between “forced marriage” and “arranged marriage”. Yet could poor Sabia Rani be said to have had any meaningful agency, any real choice?
A piece in the Guardian this morning reminded me I’ve been meaning to point to the work of Rose Hacker, who has started out as a journalist at the age of 100. But this is no mere novelty piece – she’s appearing every fortnight in my local Camden New Journal with a usually solid piece.
The daughter of an East End Jewish rag trade worker, she was a Labour activist and one of Britain’s first sex therapists. I don’t know if anyone is working on a biography, but if no one is, someone should get on with it.
She started the year with a piece Poverty should be history by now – words of wisdom from the old.
Australia’s small ski industry is obviously doomed, but there could soon (by 2050) be no white stuff at all in the land of the Man from Snowy River, which is really bad news for the water supplies of Melbourne and Adelaide (and I would expect for the hydro-electric scheme that runs in the area).
The CSIRO reported this week that climate change could all but wipe out snow falls by 2050. The resulting loss of run-off from melting snow would seriously reduce water levels in the Snowy and Murrumbidgee rivers.
… As the snow vanished, Professor Adams said, about half a million hectares of forest that acts as a key rainwater catchment at the head of the river would dry out, leading to massive bushfires that would destroy huge areas of mature trees.
New trees would begin growing to replace those burnt out. But, the professor said, growing trees suck up far more water than mature ones. The thirst of the regrowing forest would “sharply reduce” mountain water running into key rivers and dams, including Lake Eucumbene and Lake Jindabyne, for 30 years.
But there might be some good news in Australia’s current drought – according to this piece it might follow a historic pattern in seeing off, finally, the dreadful John Howard, Prime Minister of the 1950s who has somehow held power in Australia for the past decade and done an awful lot to take the country back half a century.
Over on Comment is Free I’ve got a piece about commuting inspired by a iPod advert showing a person “spirited away” by their music – their clothes sitting empty on a crowded train. It reminded me of the childhood incantation “don’t go wishing your life away”…
And yes I do really recommend the Ghanaian peanut chicken, should you have a chance to sample it!
At home with the flu, feeling blah, but reading some interesting stuff so I don’t sleep the day away and then wake the night away…
The report also says that strong economic growth in China and India means they are often wrongly labelled as the main culprits. While India has 16.8% of the world’s population it emits just 4.1% of the world’s carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, China is the world’s leader in solar power.
A poll of 2,000 adults and 350 children published today found that 80 per cent of 10 to 15-year-olds were “quite happy†or “very happy†with their family life. The same proportion said that things were “just as good†or “better†since the separation.
Less than a third of the children (28 per cent) longed for their parents to get back together. An “end to the arguments†was cited as the greatest benefit of divorce by far.
These include the 306-metre-high “Shard of Glass” tower planned for London Bridge, which will be Britain’s tallest building. Although plans for a second tower, the 200-metre Minerva building, have been scaled down, two other proposed buildings, a 324-metre high Bishopsgate tower and a 209-metre building at 20 Fenchurch Street, have also raised alarm at Unesco.
Prof Schulze-Makuch says that, given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved with the internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide.
The Viking experiments of the 1970s would not have noticed alien hydrogen peroxide-based life and would have killed it by drowning and overheating the microbes, he claimed.
About