The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming:
Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is growing, Malawi’s has started to fall apart as the country’s economy has collapsed and its international relations have deteriorated. Many of Malawi’s biggest donors, including the UK government’s Department for International Development, suspended budgetary support to the nation last year because of concerns about governance and the Malawian government’s refusal to devalue its currency as recommended by the International Monetary Fund.
Although the United Kingdom reinstated some funding to help transport fertilizer, many Malawians couldn’t purchase it this year. Changuya walked for an hour and a half to the depot in town, only to find that all the subsidized fertilizer was gone and she would not have been able to afford it anyway.
“African Agriculture: Dirt Poor.” — Natasha Gilbert, Nature
See also: “The Last Famine.” Paul Salopek, Foreign Policy
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The key to solving hunger in Africa starts with improving the soil. An overview of agricultural subsidies and the debate over whether the best approach is through inorganic fertilizers or greener, cheaper (but more difficult) solutions like no-till farming:
“Fertilizer use in Africa is at the mercy of precarious politics. Although Rwanda’s fertilizer programme is growing, Malawi’s has started to fall apart as the country’s economy has collapsed and its international relations have deteriorated. Many of Malawi’s biggest donors, including the UK government’s Department for International Development, suspended budgetary support to the nation last year because of concerns about governance and the Malawian government’s refusal to devalue its currency as recommended by the International Monetary Fund.
“Although the United Kingdom reinstated some funding to help transport fertilizer, many Malawians couldn’t purchase it this year. Changuya walked for an hour and a half to the depot in town, only to find that all the subsidized fertilizer was gone and she would not have been able to afford it anyway.”
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Published: Mar 28, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,531 words)
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Exploring the life and work of the Czech playwright, politician and philosopher:
‘I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,’ Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay ‘Politics and Conscience’ as ‘the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.’ He coined a word for this power, samopohyb, which his graceful and sensitive longtime translator, Paul Wilson, believes is derived from samopohybný (‘self-propelled’). Wilson has rendered the word variously as ‘self-momentum’ and ‘automatism.’
“Havel’s Specter: On Václav Havel.” — Caleb Crain, The Nation
See also: “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician.” — James Ryerson, Lingua Franca, July 1, 2001
Photo: Prague-Life
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The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches:
The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.
“The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).” — James Bamford, Wired
See also: “The Journalist and the Spies.” — Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, Sept. 19, 2011
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The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches:
“The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks ‘basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.’ Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. ‘A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,’ she says, ‘incredibly intimate, personal conversations.’ Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. ‘It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,’ she says.”
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Published: Mar 15, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,387 words)
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Has political parody in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke?
Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against Putin’s decision to stand for a third presidential term in the election of 4th March. (He purported to stand aside in 2008 in taking the role of Prime Minister.) If he had been more connected with Russia’s fast-growing online culture, he would have known that by comparing the protestors’ white ribbons to condoms (as he did in the same phone-in), and metaphorically inviting his opponents to come to him to be hypnotised, suffocated and consumed, he was only offering himself up to the ridicule of the satirists who have played such a large role in the nation’s sudden political change of mood.
“With My Little Eye.” — Rachel Polonsky, Prospect
See also: “The Civil Archipelago.” — David Remnick, The New Yorker, Dec. 19, 2011
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Has political satire in Russia turned Vladimir Putin into a national joke?
“Putin, who says that he does not use the internet, seemed unaware that much of the fear that he generated in his first decade in power has evaporated in the past year. Provoked by allegedly falsified results in the December Duma elections, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against Putin’s decision to stand for a third presidential term in the election of 4th March. (He purported to stand aside in 2008 in taking the role of Prime Minister.) If he had been more connected with Russia’s fast-growing online culture, he would have known that by comparing the protestors’ white ribbons to condoms (as he did in the same phone-in), and metaphorically inviting his opponents to come to him to be hypnotised, suffocated and consumed, he was only offering himself up to the ridicule of the satirists who have played such a large role in the nation’s sudden political change of mood.”
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Published: Feb 22, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,082 words)
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