Media and Natural Disasters - Global Issues: "what world news from a media outlet really is: is it coverage of events occurring around the world, or is it selective coverage of events occurring around the world, presented in a framework that meets other, local needs, interests, and demands?"

Foreign Affairs - Who Will Control the Internet? - Kenneth Neil Cukier: "Power, before it comes from arms or wealth, emanates from ideas. The Internet has emerged as a piece of critical information infrastructure for every nation. Developed countries increasingly rely on it for their economic livelihood and basic communications; developing nations recognize it as a way of linking people together, enabling commercial relationships, and generating the transparency and civic dialogue that undergird democratic governance. Information technology can also strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes, but there seems little doubt that in its current form the Internet's general influence is progressive rather than regressive."

The Observer | UK News | 2050 - and immortality is within our grasp: "Philips, the electronics giant, is developing the world's first rollable display which is just a millimetre thick and has a 12.5cm screen which can be wrapped around the arm. It expects to start production within two years. "

The Observer | UK News | 2050 - and immortality is within our grasp: "He believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.' "

Numerous countries are providing models of the different components of Plan B. Denmark, for example, today gets 20 percent of its electricity from wind and has plans to push this to 50 percent by 2030. Similarly, Brazil is on its way to automotive fuel self-sufficiency. With highly efficient sugarcane-based ethanol supplying 40 percent of its automotive fuel in 2005, it could phase out gasoline within a matter of years.39

The dysfunctional global economy The central challenge, the key to building the new economy, is getting the market to tell the ecological truth. The dysfunctional global economy of today has been shaped by distorted market prices that do not incorporate environmental costs.

The first big test of the international community’s capacity to manage scarcity may come with oil or it could come with grain. If the latter is the case, this could occur when China—whose grain harvest fell by 34 million tons, or 9 percent, between 1998 and 2005—turns to the world market for massive imports of 30 million, 50 million, or possibly even 100 million tons of grain per year.

Many early civilizations that moved onto an economic path that nature could not sustain. We, too, are on such a path.

The western economic model—the fossilfuel- based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for China’s 1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India either, which by 2031 is projected to have even more people than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where countries everywhere are competing for the same resources—the same oil, grain, and iron ore—the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either.21

Two major countries driving climate change. With this level of coal use and with oil and natural gas use also climbing fast, it is only a matter of time before China’s carbon emissions match those of the United States. Then the world will have two major countries driving climate change.

Half the world’s pigs are now found in China.13Although eating hamburgers is a defining element of the U.S. lifestyle, China’s 2005 meat consumption of 67 million tons is far above the 38 million tons eaten in the United States. While U.S. meat intake is rather evenly distributed between beef, pork, and poultry, in China pork totally dominates. Indeed, half the world’s pigs are now found in China.13

China has replaced the United States as the leading consumer of basic commodities.11For many years environmentalists have pointed to the United States as the world’s leading consumer, noting that 5 percent of the world’s people were consuming nearly a third of the earth’s resources. Although that was true for some time, it no longer is. China has replaced the United States as the leading consumer of basic commodities.11

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcityThe world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.10

The globalization of the world food economy will also be reversed, as the higher price of oil raises the cost of transporting food internationally. In response, food production and consumption will become much more localized, leading to diets based more on locally produced food and seasonal availability.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other highyielding fuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As of 2005, some 42 countries have populations that are stable or declining slightly in size as a result of falling birth rates. But now for the first time ever, demographers are projecting population declines in some countries because of rising death rates, among them Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland. In the absence of an accelerated shift to smaller families, this list of countries is likely to grow much longer in the years immediately ahead.6 The most recent mid-level U.N. demographic projections show world population increasing from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.1 billion in 2050. But such an increase seems highly unlikely, considering the deterioration in life-support systems now under way in much of the world.

Human physical presence In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.3

A century ago, annual growth in the world economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions. As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing,and soils are eroding.

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "A barrel of oil contains the equivalent of almost 25,000 hours of human labour. A gallon of petrol contains the energy equivalent of 500 hours � enough to propel a three-ton 4x4 along 10 miles; to push it yourself would take nearly three weeks. To support economic growth, the world currently requires more than 30 billion barrels of oil a year."

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "Of course, the end of the world has been promised by Jews, Christians, Muslims and assorted crazies with sandwich boards for as long as there has been a human world to end. But those doomsdays were the product of faith; reason always used to say the world will continue. The point about the new apocalypse is that this situation has reversed. Now faith tells us we will be able to solve our problems; reason says we have no answers now and none are likely in the future."

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "There are many ways in which this might turn out to be true. First, the human population is continuing to rise exponentially. It is currently approaching 6.5 billion, in 1900 it was 1.65 billion, in 1800 it was around a billion, in 1500 it was 500m. The figures show that economic and technological progress is loading the planet with billions more people. By keeping humans alive longer and by feeding them better, progress is continually pushing population levels. With population comes pollution. "

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "Some suggest that this institutional breakdown is now happening in the developed world, in the form of a 'democratic deficit'. This is happening at a number of levels. There is the supranational. In this, either large corporations or large institutions � the EU, the World Bank � gradually remove large areas of decision-making from the electorate, hollowing out local democracies."

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "But there are, as he readily admits, flies in the ointment of his optimism. First, he makes the crucial concession that, though a society may progress, individuals don't. Human nature does not progress at all. Our aggressive, tribal nature is hard-wired, unreformed and unreformable. Individually we are animals and, as animals, incapable of progress. The trick is to cage these animal natures in effective institutions: education, the law, government. But these can go wrong. 'The thing that scares me,' he says, 'is that these institutions can misfire.'"

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "This 'social knowledge' is progressive because it allows ideas to be tested and the most effective to survive. This knowledge is embodied in institutions, which, unlike individuals, can rise above our animal natures. "

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "Ormerod suspects that capitalism is indeed, like cities, a lasting change in the human condition. 'Immense strides forward have been taken,' he says. It may be that, after millennia of striving, we have found the right course. Capitalism may be the Darwinian survivor of a process of natural selection that has seen all other systems fail."

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "For Ormerod, there may be very rare but similar qualitative leaps in the organisation of society. The creation of cities, he believes, is one. Cities emerged perhaps 10,000 years ago, not long after humanity ceased being hunter-gatherers and became farmers. Other apparently progressive developments cannot compete. The Roman empire, for example, once seemed eternal, bringing progress to the world. But then, one day, it collapsed and died. The question thus becomes: is our liberal-democratic-capitalist way of doing things, like cities, an irreversible improvement in the human condition, or is it like the Roman empire, a shooting star of wealth and success, soon to be extinguished?"

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: "Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating."

KurzweilAI.net: "The idea that comets and meteorites seeded an early Earth with the tools to make life gained momentum recently as scientists scanning a galaxy 12 million light-years away detected copious amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), molecules critical to all known forms of life. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "In order to do so, some reforms are needed, but if the price to pay is the end of Germany's social agreement, national elites may accept a 'trade off' between a diminished capitalist vitality and the preservation of its social model. "

Waiting for the lights to go out - Sunday Times - Times Online: " Born today, you could expect to live 25 to 30 years longer than your Victorian forebears, up to 45 years longer than your medieval ancestors and at least 55 years longer than your Stone Age precursors. It is highly unlikely that your birth will kill you or your mother or that, in later life, you will suffer typhoid, plague, smallpox, dysentery, polio, or dentistry without anaesthetic. You will enjoy a standard of living that would have glazed the eyes of the Emperor Nero, thanks to the 2% annual economic growth rate sustained by the developed world since the industrial revolution."

Aljazeera.Net - The great power games in the Middle East: "Rather than reaching out to the Muslim masses through their real representatives, the West has been indulging in a futile monologue, conversing only with those who echo its own words and speak for its own interests."

Aljazeera.Net - The great power games in the Middle East: "The policy of engineering the cultural and political Islamic map through pockets of alienated elites imposed on the Muslim majority is at the root of the crisis of confidence and climate of tension marking relations between the Western world and Islam."

Aljazeera.Net - The great power games in the Middle East: "The problem with 'Arab democracy' is that the forces it is likely to yield will not be the West's proteges, but the so-called hardliners: those committed to their nations' sovereignty over their lands and resources.
That the political status quo has remained resolutely unchanged in the Arab world has nothing to do with culture or religion. It is all down to the global strategies of dominance that require a domesticated democracy at the service of foreign interests in the region."

Aljazeera.Net - The great power games in the Middle East: "Two years ago, the Rand Corporation, a think-tank close to decision-making circles in Washington, issued a 66-page report entitled Civil Democratic Islam: Partners & Resources, which identified three elements within the Islamic mix, 'the traditionalists, the fundamentalists, the modernists and secularists'.
The document recommended a strategy that strengthens the latter, or those who are 'closest to the West in terms of values and policies' and compatible with 'the contemporary international order'."

A welcome surprise: war waning globally | csmonitor.com: "At the same time, he says that a strengthening sense of an 'international community' is changing world thinking on when warfare is acceptable."

A welcome surprise: war waning globally | csmonitor.com: "The report finds that the total number of conflicts declined by 40 percent since the cold war ended. The average number of deaths per conflict has also declined dramatically, from 37,000 in 1950 to 600 in 2002. The study found 25 civil conflicts last year - the lowest number since 1976."

Asia Times Online :: Asian news hub providing the latest news and analysis from Asia: "Revving up the China threat
There is a drive in the US to refocus attention on the long-term challenge posed by China, and also fresh concerns over Beijing's pursuit of oil supplies in strategic areas of the globe. These trends have joined to propel a new swing of the pendulum that calls for a major US buildup to counter China's recent arms acquisitions, in the process shaping America's military policy. - "

The Real Threat of Fascism - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "The racist hatred of Arabs, fundamentalist Christianity or an illusory sense of perpetual war may well be taking the place of Hitler�s hatred for communists and Jews. " ...Thomas Freidman of the New York Times has written enthusiastically that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist”, and that “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15…”.

The Real Threat of Fascism - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Fewer, larger competitors dominate all economic activity, and their political will is expressed with the millions of dollars they spend lobbying politicians and funding policy formulation in the many right-wing institutes which now limit public discourse to the question of how best to serve the interests of business. "

The Real Threat of Fascism - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the end result of political and economic processes which these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany. "

OECD Observer: Old glory: "One of the most striking paradoxes of today�s OECD societies is that, although people live longer and healthier, they also tend to retire earlier and younger. The trend in the US is not as marked as in some countries, but it is there nonetheless. By 2030, almost a fifth of the American population is projected to be aged 65 and over, compared with around an eighth only five years ago. On the basis of current employment rates, the ratio of workers to retirees will decline from over 3 to 1 in 2000 to around 2 to 1 in 2030, putting pressure on pension budgets."

OECD Observer: Globalisation is still just beginning: "Just how integrated is today�s global economy? One indicator is trade, now a major engine of growth in developed and developing countries alike. The volume of world merchandise traded today is about 22 times what it was in 1950. During the same period, the value of the world�s output has increased seven times over."

OECD Observer: Globalisation is still just beginning: "The difference is that the extent of global integration between national markets is much greater than in the past�although in many respects, less than popular opinion would have us believe. Moreover, it is the fast pace of change which has put enormous pressure on societies to adapt and to create new skills."

Foreign Policy In Focus | Commentary | A Story of Leaders, Partners, and Clients: "The U.S. officials have made clear the purpose of this agreement. A senior official announced that �Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century � We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.� The deputy State Department spokesman explained further that the United States was ready to �help India� with command and control, early warning and missile defense, and noted that �Some of these items may not be as glamorous as combat aircraft, but I think for those of you who follow defense issues you�ll appreciate the significance.� "

Foreign Policy In Focus | Commentary | A Story of Leaders, Partners, and Clients: "As the Cold War ended, the United States determined that no other power would be allowed to emerge as a potential rival. The now infamous 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance prepared by Paul Wolfowitz, the under-secretary of defense for policy for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, that was leaked to the press declared �Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.�"

Foreign Policy In Focus | Commentary | A Story of Leaders, Partners, and Clients: "Much of the commentary has focused resolutely and rightly on the wisdom and possible consequences of the new agreements on military and nuclear policy and programs. But these recent agreements need also to be seen in the light of the more than 50 years of U.S. efforts to have India become a part of American political, strategic, and economic plans for Asia. What becomes clear is how difficult this proved to be over the years. "

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People's Daily Online -- World population exceeds 6.4 billion: UN Population Fund: "According to report of NHK TV, the United Nations Population Fund revealed Oct 12 in its white book on world population that the world population has reached 6.4647 billion. "

Behind Artificial Intelligence, a Squadron of Bright Real People - New York Times: "New artificial intelligence systems - like that embodied in Stanley - are now capable of evaluating a huge amount of data from sensors and then making probabilistic decisions."