HEADLINES FROM
Earth Policy Institute

WORLD FACING FOURTH CONSECUTIVE GRAIN HARVEST SHORTFALL
Lester R. Brown

This year's world grain harvest is falling short of consumption by 93 million tons, dropping world grain stocks to the lowest level in 30 years. As rising temperatures and falling water tables hamstring farmers' efforts to expand production, prices of wheat and rice are turning upward. (See data) [Keep Reading]

WORLD CREATING FOOD BUBBLE ECONOMY BASED ON UNSUSTAINABLE USE OF WATER
Lester R. Brown

As world water demand has tripled over the last half-century, it has exceeded the sustainable yield of aquifers in scores of countries, leading to falling water tables. In effect, governments are satisfying the growing demand for food by overpumping groundwater, a measure that virtually assures a drop in food production when the aquifer is depleted. Knowingly or not, governments are creating a "food bubble" economy.

As water use climbs, the world is incurring a vast water deficit... [Keep Reading]

ILLEGAL LOGGING THREATENS ECOLOGICAL & ECONOMIC STABILITY
Janet Larsen

Extensive floods in Indonesia during early 2002 have killed hundreds of people, destroyed thousands of homes, damaged thousands of hectares of rice paddy fields, and inundated Indonesian insurance companies with flood-related claims. Rampant deforestation, much of it from illegal logging, has destroyed forests that stabilize soils and regulate river flow, causing record floods and landslides. [Keep Reading]

HEADLINES FROM
MotherJones.com

Chad 2.0
Computer voting was supposed to revolutionize elections. But has it just updated old problems?
November/December 2003 Issue

The lessons of Florida's 2000 election debacle were painfully clear: Butterfly ballots and punch cards are no way to run an election...

But a closer look at electronic voting finds the new machines far from fail-safe. Tech experts say voting-terminal technology lags years behind the state of the art in both encryption and design. [Full Story]

Toxic Immunity
Faced with a hazardous-waste crisis, the Pentagon is pushing hard to exempt itself from the nation's environmental laws.
by Jon R. Luoma | November/December 2003 Issue

"It feels like somebody wrote a new rule -- the bigger a mess you make, the easier it should be to just walk away," says Laura Olah, a Wisconsin activist who heads a grassroots group called Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger... Today, a witches' brew of contaminants, including the heavy metals mercury and cadmium and the cancer-causing compounds carbon tetrachloride and trichloroethylene, is seeping into the groundwater beneath the 7,300-acre site. [Full Story]

The Making of the Corporate Judiciary
How big business is quietly funding a judicial revolution in the nation's courts
by Michael Scherer | November/December 2003 Issue

Like many of President Bush's lower-court nominees, William H. Pryor Jr. has had a hand in just about every legal social theory that drives Senate Democrats to outrage. As the attorney general of Alabama, he pushed for the execution of the mentally retarded, compared homosexuality to bestiality, defended the posting of Bible quotes at the courthouse door, and advocated rescinding a portion of the Voting Rights Act. [Full Story]

HEADLINES FROM
The Nation.

The Struggle for Russia
by Stephen F. Cohen

The arrest last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the principal owner of Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, and the richest of the country's seventeen state-anointed billionaire oligarchs, on charges of fraud and tax evasion has put Russia back in the forefront of US media attention. But is the story being reported the full, or essential, one? [Full Story]

Collapse in Cancún
by Doug Henwood

The mid-September failure of the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference in Cancún was widely cheered on the left. A Global Exchange (GX) press release described it as a "failure...for the giant transnational corporations that are manipulating the trade agenda to engineer a power grab that will dramatically reduce the strength of democratically elected government." [Full Story]

Dying for AIDS Drugs
by Esther Kaplan | 16 October 2003

As the growing epidemic slams up against state austerity measures, ADAP has descended into crisis, and Republicans in Washington have refused to intervene. As of early October, more than 600 people with HIV have been denied access to medications through the program. [Full Story]

HEADLINES FROM
The Wilson Quarterly

THE KNOW NOTHING VOTE

A poll conducted by Zogby International for the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design advocacy group, found that nearly two-thirds of Ohioans supported teaching both Darwin’s theory and the scientific evidence against it. Another spring 2002 poll, conducted for The Cleveland Plain Dealer by Mason-Dixon, a Washington-based polling organization, produced a similar result. [Keep Reading]

A WORLD ON THE EDGE
Is the current formula for universal free markets and democracy spurring ethnic violence around the world?
by Amy Chua

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 80 million ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines live on less than $2 a day. Forty percent spend their entire lives in temporary shelters. Seventy percent of all rural Filipinos own no land. Almost a third have no access to sanitation...

My aunt’s killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us have ever imagined. [Keep Reading]

GIVE AMERICANS THE RIGHT TO VOTE!
A Brief Review of “Shoring Up the Right to Vote for President: A Modest Proposal” by Alexander Keyssar

Though attention soon shifted elsewhere in all the excitement at the close of the 2000 election, when Republicans in the Florida legislature threatened to select the state’s presidential electors, it came as a shock even to many knowledgeable observers that Americans do not possess a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote for president. Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution leaves it up to each state’s legislature to decide how the state’s delegates to the Electoral College (which actually elects the president) shall be chosen. Keyssar, a historian at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, urges enactment of a constitutional amendment to remedy the defect. [Keep Reading]