From OilPrice.com:

Song Xiaojun, a former senior officer of the People's Liberation Army, warned that Australia cannot juggle its relationships with the United States and China indefinitely and Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later. Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the US or 'son' of China.

What is also notable about Song's remarks is that they coincided with Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr's first official visit to China, where Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi urged Australia to dismiss its alliance with the United States, a decades-old bipartisan and central pillar of the nation's foreign policy, as "the time for Cold War alliances has passed."

Stacey Leasca | Hong Kong | May 15

Global Post - Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources.

Humans are using a planet and a half worth of natural resources, according to the World Wildlife Fund's annual Living Planet report.

The report said, "During the 1970s, humanity as a whole passed the point at which the annual Ecological Footprint matched the Earth’s annual biocapacity. This situation is called “ecological overshoot”, and has continued since then. An overshoot of 50 percent means it would take 1.5 years for the Earth to regenerate the renewable resources that people used in 2007 and absorb CO2 waste."

Mark Abelson | New York | April 26

Bloomberg - The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants said.

Among 99 protest targets in midtown Manhattan on May 1 are JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) offices, said Marisa Holmes, a member of Occupy’s May Day planning committee. Events are scheduled for more than 115 cities, including an effort to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) investors relied on police to get past protests at their annual meeting this week.

The BBC has just tweeted and @YourAnonNews has confirmed that the hacktivist collective Anonymous has taken down the UK government's Home Office website "for continued derogation of civil liberties" and "draconian surveillance proposals".

Earlier today, there were reports that an Anonymous group hacker had posted thousands of internal documents he claimed to have obtained from China National Import & Export Corp (CEIEC), a major company that holds Chinese government defense contracts. Apparently several of the documents leaked were US DoD material related to logistics in Afghanistan, although there was no explanation from either the hacker or CEIEC as to how such documents might have ended up in their possession.

Also today, @YourAnonNews asked for donations to a superPAC which is trying to unseat SOPA sponsor Sen. Lamar Smith (R-TX) in 2012 and began talking about an international "stay at home" day as a protest againt the 1% on Mayday.

Looks like the hacker group is upping the ante in its confrontations with the establishment worldwide.

"Weather weirding"

Thanks to Cheryl Rofer for pointing me to some good news which, oddly, hasn't been shouted from the rooftops. According to the World Bank, the world reached the UN’s "millennium development goal" of halving world poverty between 1990 and 2015 five years early.

A lot of the credit goes to China. Half the long-term rate of decline is attributable to that country alone, which has taken 660m people out of poverty since 1981. China also accounts for most of the extraordinary progress in East Asia, which in the early 1980s had the highest incidence of poverty in the world, with 77% of the population below $1.25 a day. In 2008 the share was just 14%. If you exclude China, the numbers are less impressive. Of the roughly 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day in 2008, 1.1 billion of them were outside China. That number barely budged between 1981 and 2008, an outcome that Martin Ravallion, the director of the bank’s Development Research Group, calls “sobering”.

If China accounts for the largest share of the long-term improvement, Africa has seen the largest recent turnaround. Its poverty headcount rose at every three-year interval between 1981 and 2005, the only continent where this happened. The number almost doubled from 205m in 1981 to 395m in 2005. But in 2008 it fell by 12m, or five percentage points, to 47%—the first time less than half of Africans have been below the poverty line. The number of poor people had also been rising (from much lower levels) in Latin America and in eastern Europe and Central Asia. These regions have reversed the trend since 2000.

Obviously there are still a very large number of people living in abject poverty in the world - but it's less than it was. That's a matter for celebration, and I'm entirely mystified as to why this hasn't been given far more (any) play by the media.

It appears that access codes to the International Space Station were kept, unencrypted (although I'm not sure it would make a difference) on a laptop that was stolen last year.

Now, this is kind of silly: first, unencrypted? Really? So some guy sitting in his underwear in his den could, say, point the ISS in the other direction? And apparently, unencrypted laptops seem to be the norm at NASA, which ought to put paid to the notion that NASA is strictly a DoD department.

Worse, what if...and this seems a pretty likely scenario now...the laptop was stolen just to gain access to the ISS? After all, a notable exclusion to the program is China (Russia, Japan, Canada, and Europe are the principal partners...and who the hell thought it was a good idea to leave the only nation with any money off the team?)

As the years-long drought in Texas subsides, I feel this would be a good time to remind everyone that water is not only precious, but scarce.

Indeed, Africa is seeing some of the worst droughts in recorded history. Drought doesn't only affect humanity, afflicting us with thirst, famine, and war, but wildlife too. And while the famine in Somalia (not directly water-related, but...) has been declared "over", countries like Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone face dismal prospects for the near future.

I wonder why the UN is dragging its feet here.

I'm trying to think of a sovereign leader who, in the face of international pressure of the nature that Assad faces and without the support of his own people, has stayed in power for very long.

Qaddafi certainly had the grudging support of the Libyan people until he unmasked as the monster that he was. Hussein had to only deal with "No Fly" zones for much of his tenure.

Anyone else?

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

Many of us are thinking about the changes we want to make this year. For some, these changes will be financial; for others, physical or spiritual. But for all of us, there are important resolutions we can make to “green” our lives. Although this is often a subject focused on by industrialized nations, people in developing countries can also take important steps to reduce their growing environmental impact.

It is with deep sadness that I take note of this:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. A space shuttle left the International Space Station for the very last time Tuesday, heading home to end the 30-year run of a vessel that kept U.S. astronauts flying to and from orbit longer than any other rocketship.

Atlantis slipped away after performing a partial lap around the space station. Ten pairs of eyes pressed against the windows, four in the shuttle and six in the station.

All that remains of NASA's final shuttle voyage is the touchdown, targeted for the pre-dawn hours of Thursday back home in Florida.

I'm sure this won't happen, at least in the US, anytime in the near future, but you have to admit there's an awful lot of sense here:

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

The US and Mexican governments have rejected the findings as misguided.

The Global Commission's 24-page report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.

Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

Increasing demand for water continues to put a strain on available water sources, threatening the livelihood of millions of small-scale farmers who depend on water for their crops. At a time when one in eight people lack access to safe water, Nourishing the Planet points to low-cost, small-scale innovations to better manage this vital resource. These efforts are increasing the availability of water for crops and helping farmers improve crop productivity and become more food-secure.

Seventy percent of the world’s freshwater is used for irrigation, and global water resources are drying up as climate change takes hold and population growth continues. 60 percent of the world’s hungry people live in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—most of them on small farms—where they do not have a reliable source of water to produce sufficient yields. Only 4 percent of the cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently equipped for irrigation. 95 percent of cropland in the region depends on rain, and climate scientists predict that rainfall on the continent will decline in the coming decades. But there is great potential to expand irrigation with small-scale solutions.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s led to a near tripling of global grain production and a doubling of the world’s irrigated area. It also, however, demanded vast quantities of water. Previous agricultural investments have focused narrowly on increasing crop yields, while there has been relatively little research and investment in ways to make better use of scarce water resources. Affordable innovations that boost agricultural development and meet the increasing demand on already-scarce water resources while also mitigating the impacts of climate change, are more important than ever.

Nourishing the Planet recommends three models for effective water management that have the potential for getting ‘more crop per drop’:

Fukushima is a disaster that could well cause one of the largest cities in the world, Tokyo a city of 32 million to become uninhabitable. This might happen because, like an invisible strato-volcano, the nuclear power station is laying down an invisible deposit of radioactive contamination each day with shifts of the wind. Like the strato-volcano's ash and lava mountains here in the Pacific Northwest, the radioactive contamination of Fukushima is cumulative, creating a mountain of ever increasing contamination and radioactivity, which will eventually exceed that of Chernobyl. This contamination can over time pollute Tokyo's water supply. With the current situation as the status quo we could see radioactive pollution coming from the ruined reactors for years to come. Where is the coverage of this event in the media?

The protests in Bahrain began on February 14. The demands were more political rights and liberties. The response of King Al Khalifa was to shoot a group of demonstrators as they marched chanting peace.

One of my passions in life is connections. I like to grasp how an event both occured and the consequences of that event by studying the ripples from and to other events.

For example, when Bush got elected, 9/11 happened. It probably would not have happened had Gore been confirmed as the duly elected President, because he would have continued Clinton's policies against Al Qaeda instead of taking his eye off the ball.

Bush being elected also created the biggest single national debt in human history, turning from a surplus that would pay off what was then a troubling debt (and imagine if we had those five trillion in the bank when the housing crisis hit) into a debt that not only consumed any possible budget residual but created a scenario where Bush was forced to encourage Americans to go deeply into debt, running up credit card balances and mortgages, whereby the nation is at the edge of the cliff of destruction.

This is what:

Yes, the rich live in a different world. And no, information won’t change them. But a revolution will. Revolutions build slowly over a long time. Then, suddenly, a critical mass, a flash point, something totally unexpected ignites the ticking bomb.

It happened recently in a remote Tunisian village. Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old college graduate, unable to pay bribes, set himself on fire to protest police confiscation of his unlicensed vegetable cart. That triggered a revolution. And his death rapidly led to the collapse of a 24-year dictatorship.

Thom Shanker | West Point, NY | February 25

New York Times - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

That reality, he said, meant that the Army would have to reshape its budget, since potential conflicts in places like Asia or the Persian Gulf were more likely to be fought with air and sea power, rather than with conventional ground forces.

February 23

Al Jaz - A Libyan plane reportedly carrying the daughter of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's leader, has been turned back from Malta after it was denied permission to land.

SNIP

The attempted landing came a day after a private Libyan jet carrying the Lebanese wife of one of Gaddhafi's sons was prevented from landing at Beirut airport in Lebanon, the Voice of Lebanon radio reported on Wednesday.

It said Hannibal Gadhafi's wife and several members of the Libyan ruling family were aboard the jet that was denied permission to land at Rafik Hariri international airport on Tuesday.

Felix Salmon, a blogger at Reuters, posted an interesting Op-Ed this weekend in The New York Times:

These days a healthy stock market doesn’t mean a healthy economy, as a glance at the high unemployment rate or the low labor-market participation rate will show. The Tea Party is right about one thing: What’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street. And the Germans aren’t buying the New York Stock Exchange for its commoditized, highly competitive and ultra-low-margin stock business, but rather for its lucrative derivatives operations.

Alexander Bolton and Ian Swanson | Washington | January 19

The Hill - Three top congressional leaders are skipping a state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao in what may be perceived by China as a snub.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) all said "thanks, but no thanks" to White House invitations for the dinner.

First it was Arkansas. Next, Louisiana, Kentucky, and Maryland, and now Sweden????

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KTHV) -- Just four days after thousands of dead blackbirds are found in Arkansas, residents in Sweden are cleaning up their own version of the unusual happening.

Officials in Sweden say about 50 birds were found in the southern Sweden city of Falkoping Wednesday morning.

Earlier in the week, another case of dead birds hit Louisiana, leaving those residents just as confused as others.

(N.B. To my friends at Agonist, "Nobody Asked Me, But..." is a regular weekly feature at my blog, where I round up ten interesting news tidbits of the day or week and make snarky little comments on. It eases me into the weekend. I normally don't crosspost these because, frankly, it's fluff and not even particularly interesting. Today, however, I made two exceptions. The second was to share this with you, and...)

I'm going to break with tradition here and rant on a Friday.

1) What's it going to take????

When are we as a people, we as liberals, going to finally sit up and say "I've had enough!"

Ap, BBC, Google, etc. - Assange has been arrested minutes ago by British authorities. The arrest was based on the Swedish warrant for sexual misconduct and rape.
I guess we'll see the s&*t hit the fan now.

Pete Spotts | Nagoya, Japan | October 27

CSM - Biodiversity researchers warn that 20 percent of vertebrate species are threatened with extinction, largely because of human damage to habitats. But conservation efforts, they say, are effective.

If a creature has a spine and walks, flies, swims, or crawls, it may be in serious trouble.

Some 20 percent of all vertebrate species on Earth are threatened by extinction, according to a newly published survey – a study the research team involved says is the most exhaustive to date on biodiversity among vertebrates.