Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

The chairman of the UN food and agriculture oragnization’s climate change group, Wulf Killman said yesterday that an emerging pattern of drought has devastated crops across Africa, central America and south-east Asia.

“Africa is our greatest worry,” he said. “Many countries are already in difficulties … and we see a pattern emerging. Southern Africa is definitely becoming drier and everyone agrees that the climate there is changing. We would expect areas which are already prone to drought to become drier with climate change.”

34 countries are now experiencing droughts and food shortages. Up to 30 million people will need food assistance this year.

The worst affected countries include Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Eritrea and Zambia, a group of countries where at least 15 million people will go hungry without aid. The situation in Niger, Djibouti and Sudan is reported to be deteriorating rapidly.

Severe droughts have also badly affected crops in Cuba, Cambodia, Australia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Morocco, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. According to the UN’s famine early warning system, 16 countries, including Peru, Ecuador and Lesotho, face “unfavourable prospects” with current crops.

In Europe, one of the worst droughts on record has hit Spain and Portugal and halved some crop yields. In Morocco the same regional drought has devastated farming and the government fears an influx of people into the cities.

Climate change, driven by greenhouse gases and global warming is changing weather patterns and contributing to the growth of deserts. World food production has been flat for the last four or five years; food stocks have been drawn down to make up for the shortfall. If climate change worstens then a major crisis is unavoidable.

And, again, the only answers that I can see are Green answers.

Reading these kinds of stories about permanent environmental degradation really makes me wonder what kind of world will our children have?

(Liberally excerpted Sam Smith’s Undernews blog.)
Instant runoff voting is recommended in Robert Rule’s of Order and is used by the American Political Science Association to elect its president. The Academy of Motion Pictures uses a variation of it in nominations for the Oscars. In recent years, instant runoff voting has made rapid advances across the country, having won at the ballot in states such as California, Michigan and Washington. After a landslide vote in March, voters in Burlington, Vermont will use IRV to elect their major representatives starting in 2006. Voters in San Francisco gave IRV high marks after using it for the first time to elect their Board of Supervisors this past November. All overseas military voters from Arkansas will cast IRV ballots in upcoming runoffs. Additionally, IRV has garnered the support of groups such as the League of Women Voters, the Grange, and individuals such as Sen. John McCain, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. and DNC Chairman Howard Dean.

One revelation in the Downing Street memos that has not made its way into the mainstream U.S. media is the confirmation that the U.S. had been using napalm against Iraqis.

Defense Minister, Adam Ingram, admitted that the US had misled the British high-command about the use of napalm, but he would not comment on the extent of the cover up. The use of firebombs puts the US in breach of the 1980 Convention on Certain Chemical Weapons (CCW) and is a violation the Geneva Protocol against the use of white phosphorous, “since its use causes indiscriminate and extreme injuries especially when deployed in an urban area.”

Stories about the use of napalm first began to surface after the siege of Falluja where reports of innocent civilians dying and “melted” corpses aroused suspicion that the U.S. was using its new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77.

At the time the administration vehemently denied the stories, even lying to its British allies. But now the leaked British documents confirm that use.

WMDs have finally been found in Iraq–and we are the ones using them.

One has to wonder when the U.S. media will decide that this story is newsworthy.

Jeffrey Dvorkin writes about accusations that are being hurled against NPR by conservative media. Just to what degree *is* NPR liberal? And to what degree does it matter?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4717847

–Nathan

Americans spend $5.2 million a year on imported American flags; the vast majority of which ($4.8 million) is for U.S. flags made in China.

You might get a good laugh with your Republican neighbor over this one.

John Patrick Grace formerly an editor on the foreign desk of The Associated Press in New York and a correspondent in The AP Rome bureau, makes a startling predicition about Iraq:

We may now be only weeks away from a complete collapse of the Iraqi army and the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq in the face of overwhelming public pressure on Tony Blair.

He bases this on the reporting of two Washinton Post reporters, Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru, with units assigned to train and work with the Iraqi military. The reporters found massive disenchantment on both sides.

An American soldier reamrked that, “We like to refer to the Iraqi army as preschoolers with guns.”

An Iraqi soldier claimed, “In 15 days, we’re all going to leave.”

Interviews by the Post reporters show that many U.S. and Iraqi troops no longer know what they are fighting for. They have been disillusioned by prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, by burgeoning debt that will never be repaid, and by the Haliburton scandal that has cost the government upwards of a billion dollars.

But tonight Bush will attempt to reassure us that everything is going just fine in Iraq.

The Downing Street *Memos* (note the plural) show the reservations that many senior administration officials had.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/27/AR2005062701584.html?nav=hcmodule

–Nathan

A consortiom of researchers and their financial backers have decided to build a fusion reactor in France.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/28/AR2005062800150.html

–Nathan

Fascinating column. In it, the author takes a legalistic approach to the subjects of Extraordinary Renditions and the Guantanamo Bay Prisoners. It should come as no surprise that the guy is a former legal counsel to the CIA.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/26/AR2005062601036.html

–Nathan