All Global News on One Page

It usually surprises people when I say that it’s a great time to be in agriculture. While the number of farmers has declined significantly since our parents’ generation, there’s no denying that food prices are up, as are the prices for farmland. And the pressure is on to feed a world population growing from 6 billion to 9 billion. We all need to eat, and it seems that finally we’re coming to realize how critical agriculture is.
But with the population booming and ever-increasing demands for development being made on our arable land, we’ve reached a dilemma: How do we provide more food to more people using fewer resources?
This question has become so controversial that every interest group seems to have a particular technology that is THE answer to global food issues, at the exclusion of all other systems or

During my 10-day cross-country road trip from NYC to Los Angeles, I was very disciplined. Not about my diet, but in keeping a strict, structured and detailed journal that included notes on the daily mileage, gas, finances and even a daily food “diary”. The food diary was, most of the days, a series of entries of “Tostitos tortilla chips”, “Cracker Jacks”, “bananas”, “Lay’s sour cream chips”, “Zone Diet energy bars” and “margaritas”, words and food items that will never make the cover page of culinary magazines.
The first interesting page on my culinary adventure on I-10 was the oysters in Apalachicola, the heart of the Forgotten Coast, as it is called. The coast, famous for its seafood and better yet, oysters, offered the great opportunity for a “proper” dinner on our second evening at Papa Joe’s Oyster

The other night as I watched another installment of “Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes”, wherein Ms. Winfrey would finally confront former show regular and inspirational speaker Iyanla Vanzant, I had my very own “aha moment.” With tensions mounting between Ms. Winfrey and the segment producers regarding the upcoming taping, in the middle of all of the unfolding drama, Oprah turned inquisitively to one of her young assistants and asked “Is that top Lanvin?” Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. For the first time, it hit me like a ton of bricks — fashion was truly losing one of its biggest allies, champions and dream makers — Oprah Winfrey.
Besides losing a woman that can apparently detect a Lanvin knock-off a mile away, the fashion industry is losing a daily on-air luxury apparel

London. Johannesburg and Nairobi. Fort Worth, St. Louis and San

On 14th of March 2011, the Independent newspaper from the UK published an article suggesting that the iPhone 5 would not include Near Field Communication (NFC) capability. A few days later on the 17th of March, Forbes rebutted the Guardian’s article quoting a source that said NFC was a sure thing. Who’s right, and will Apple delay their NFC launch to better perfect the tech?
The Independent article was surprising as it was hot off the heels of Google already launching their Nexus-S handset with NFC capability and a host of other manufacturers were flocking to utilize Android’s new OS codenamed Gingerbread. Of course, having an NFC chip in a handset doesn’t automatically mean that you can use it in a constructive manner for stuff like payments, coupon redemption and interactions at the point of

Backpack Block Party! is on a quest to find the backpack of your dreams. Let’s meet a contender!
Where did you find your backpack?
I found my backpack at a church sale when I was a wee little 8-year-old.
Is this the backpack of your dreams?
I would say so, because it fits all the essentials without being too squished.
read full news from www.huffingtonpost.com

Everyone knows that the Road Home Program, though well intentioned, has been deeply flawed since its inception. In 2007, working with the National Fair Housing Alliance, my staff at the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center and I set out to right at least one of the major program flaws.
The Road Home Program was designed to provide rebuilding grants to residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina based on the value of their homes, rather than the cost to repair the damage. This policy choice had the dramatic affect of impeding New Orleans’ struggling recovery.
Because pre-storm home values were significantly lower in African-American neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, homeowners in African-American neighborhoods consistently received far smaller Road Home grants than homes in white neighborhoods; and they were far more likely to have large gaps in the resources needed to

When he announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a Navy Seal team in Pakistan, President Barack Obama said, “Justice has been done.” Mr. Obama misused the word “justice” when he made that statement. He should have said, “Retaliation has been accomplished.” A former professor of constitutional law should know the difference between those two concepts. The word “justice” implies an act of applying or upholding the

When MTV first started airing 16 and Pregnant, its documentary series about teenage girls having babies, I was riveted. Though the show was accused of glorifying and implicitly endorsing teen motherhood, 16 and Pregnant covered a fairly wide range of girls and experiences in a realistic way. We saw girls who got married and girls whose boyfriends disappeared, girls from middle-class families and poor ones, girls who had divorced parents and girls who had married ones. And it looked like MTV was doing a great service — until Teen Mom came along.
Designed as a companion piece to 16 and Pregnant that would take a longer look at the realities of teen motherhood, Teen Mom selected four young women from the 16 and Pregnant cast and followed them for an entire

Best. Week. Ever. Last Friday, Ellie Goulding performed Elton John’s “Your Song” at the Royal

Recently, my blogs were responded to by supporters of F.E.A.S.T. and the Maudsley approach to re-feeding anorexic children or teens.
It is interesting to me how much fire these advocates of family-based treatment inspire. Their responses almost always result in an an outcry of protest and inflamed feelings. That’s a shame because

The US has said it will not withdraw the CIA station chief in Pakistan, despite his name being leaked to local media last week.

But officials quoted by US media said the name published in Pakistani news outlets was spelt incorrectly.

Relations between the countries have been under severe strain since a US raid killed Osama Bin Laden last week.

Last year the former head of the CIA in Islamabad had to be withdrawn after his identity was revealed in the media.

On Friday, the private TV channel ARY broadcast what it claimed was the current CIA station chief's

Protesters who want to stop the construction of a mosque in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay are bringing their case to court on Tuesday, the latest in a series of such disputes across America.

The nation founded on the principle of freedom of religious worship is seeing disputes from Tennessee to New York's Staten Island, as Muslims wishing to build places of worship run into opposition – almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks.

The most high profile case was the Islamic centre to be built close to Ground Zero in Manhattan – now it's the turn of what critics call the Brooklyn "mega-mosque".

Opponents of the Sheepshead Bay development – who include blogger Pamela Geller, an influential critic of Islam – say it will dramatically alter the quality of life in a quiet, residential neighbourhood.

Traffic, parking difficulties and the noise of the call to prayer will be disruptive, says the groupsuing to stop the construction, called Bay People.

"The neighbourhood residents are mostly of Italian/Russian/Jewish/Irish descent and will not benefit from having a mosque and a Muslim community centre," the Bay People website

In my previous blog on April 26, I decried President Obama’s obvious abandonment of the ‘core’ of voters who had come together with almost unprecedented political faith to give him a clear mandate on the domestic issue most concerning them: creating the nearly 20 million high-quality stable jobs needed to return our nation to near full employment in real terms. Few things that I’ve written since 2006 have elicited more raw response.
It’s hard to find but one other president in our nation’s history who, on the day of his inauguration, was invested with more free political capital than was Barack Obama. That political capital was found in a near-commonly accepted national agenda, namely, to pull us out of the Great Recession of 2007 by helping create millions of jobs, and a near-commonly targeted national enemy, namely, the banks. Only Franklin Roosevelt started with as much capital, as he too was swept into office on the same near-consensus.
Armies of progressives and conservatives alike believed that the “hope” which

There has been quite a bit of acrimony coming the way of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in recent weeks. Players are frustrated with the lockout and it preventing them from going to work and getting paid. And there is a public scapegoat for those feelings: the leader of their management adversary: Goodell.
Recent comments in the news from players have taken the Commissioner to task for the predicament that football finds itself in. Goodell has been called a “joke”, “fraud” and more.
What to make of this?
Not much.
This labor lockout/litigation is a long and messy process that will eventually end in a negotiated settlement but leave a lot of hurt feelings in its wake.
The relationship between NFL and NFLPA leadership has been one lacking trust, honest communication and chemistry from the

Undoubtedly, the death of Osama bin Laden is a pivotal moment in our nation’s history, one that carries with it the opportunity to bring much-needed closure to the thousands of families who lost loved ones on 9/11, as well as an opportunity to bring much-needed closure to the war in Afghanistan. The attacks orchestrated by bin Laden are what took us to Afghanistan. Now, given his death, we must seize this moment to heal from the past harm done to our homeland and ensure that no further harm is done to our troops, by bringing them home.
Pursuant to these aims, the co-chairmen of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the CPC’s Peace and Security Taskforce, which I co-chair, sent a letter to President Obama urging the swift, safe and responsible withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from

Last Sunday a veritable flotilla of neocon former Bush Administration national security officials flooded the zone on the Sunday Morning talk shows. They were engaged in a desperate attempt to rewrite history — to argue that their methods of “enhanced interrogation” — provided the pivotal information that led to President Obama’s successful apprehension of Osama Bin Laden.
Notable “experts” — like former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and former Vice President Dick Cheney argued authoritatively that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had provided the critical information that allowed Obama to find Bin Laden — eight years later.
Even though they behave like they have inside information, it is important to note that all of these former officials are exactly that — former. In 2008 the American voters had the good sense to make them former — since then, none of them has been privy to any thing more than the information that is available to the general public about the factors did or did not result in finding the location of Bin Laden.
That said, the information that is available publicly indicates that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad — the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, did in fact provide the “nickname” of one of Bin Laden’s couriers eight years

If European judges had ruled in Max Mosley's favour, it could have increased the number of injunctions sought by famous people to stop details emerging about their private lives. A number of UK celebrities have kept stories out of the papers using "super-injunctions", despite their names leaking on Twitter. But in the US, such action rarely happens. Why?

The super-injunction story that has made the news in the UK has barely registered in the land of celebrity culture, the US.

But where it has been picked up, there is some puzzlement about all the fuss.

The news and gossip website Gawker joked that the Twitter account at the centre of the story was "not very impressive" to Americans:

"Six tweets of entirely un-sourced rumours about celebrities we've never heard of. That's basically [rival website] TMZ on an off day."

While in the UK, the story has evolved into a debate about a "two-track" legal system – one for mainstream media and one for social media – in the US that debate rarely happens, because all media can get away with a lot more.

And injunctions? Forget it. Americans are bemused that famous people in the UK are able to stop the publication of details of their private lives, because it goes against one of their country's founding principles, free speech.
Status update: I'm suing…

• Messages posted on social networking sites in the US are subject to the same libel laws as mainstream media (same in UK)
• But the anonymity afforded to some users makes prosecution more difficult (same in UK)
• There have been US cases brought in relation to statements made on Facebook, but removal of the offending statement is usually the end of it
• In the US, companies like Facebook that do not create content, but simply provide a forum, have not yet been subject to prosecution except where intellectual property rights are involved

The US has a booming industry in entertainment, gossip and celebrity publications, mainly based in New York and Los Angeles.

As well as Gawker, there is famed supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer – which once said a boy that was half-bat lived in New York subways – and the website TMZ, which told the world of the death of Michael

The notion of a default by the U.S. Government on outstanding Treasury securities is nonsense. This is not to say that Congress will act to raise the debt ceiling. Who knows what Congress, in its infinite wisdom, will do; but the notion that a failure to raise the debt ceiling will lead to a default by the

By Linda E. Brooks Rix
“It’s unbelievable…. The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.” ~ Bernie Madoff, as quoted in a New York magazine article, “The Madoff Tapes” (Feb. 27, 2011)
It takes one to know one.
In its

Ah, those lives of quiet desperation, stuck in ruts from which there seems to be no unsticking.
Everyone, it would seem, needs a Hesher in their lives.
Although not necessarily Hesher. Though Spencer Susser’s dark comedy hangs in there for about half of its running time, it eventually runs out of ideas and goes soft, when it’s been hard-edged from the jump.
Still, there’s something exhilarating about Hesher: Joseph Gordon-Levitt. As the title character, a headbanger with a mononym, Gordon-Levitt is a stringy-haired force of anarchy, wandering around shirtless showing his inky, home-made tattoos, cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth.
He appears as though summoned from a bottle, a malevolent genie with a bad word for everyone – but also a purpose. He shows up unannounced in the Forney household, ready to shake things up and get this family out of the pit of self-pity into which it’s fallen.
Paul Forney (Rainn Wilson) is pill-addled and depressed, still in shock from the death of his wife a few months

The real battle for the soul of the GOP started Monday with a speech on Wall Street by Speaker of the House John Boehner.
Wall Street and big business fear Tea Partiers won’t allow House Republicans to raise the debt ceiling without major spending cuts — and without tax increases on the wealthy. Wall Street and big business know this would be unacceptable to the White House and congressional Democrats.
The Street and big business want to tame the budget deficit but they don’t want to play games with the debt ceiling. Credit markets are fine at the moment, but if the debt ceiling isn’t not raised within the month — weeks before August 2, when the Treasury predicts the nation will run out of money to pay its creditors and its other bills — credit markets could go into free fall. The full faith and credit of the United States would be

When I wrote my book Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany I came across a rather intriguing concept that was put forward by the American attorney Mike Godwin. He postulated “Godwin’s Law” in 1990 which states that the more heated a debate becomes, the more likely it seems that someone will be called a Nazi. Godwin wrote: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” Though this idea may seem rather tongue-in-cheek, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to back it up. Misguided Nazi comparisons are still made in the

By Peter Stone
In the wee hours next Monday in Las Vegas, when many Sin City visitors are still sound asleep or just going to bed, an army of top fundraisers for Mitt Romney will start dialing for dollars with an eye toward raising millions for his presidential exploratory committee.
Hundreds of fundraisers have signed up for the money harvest in Vegas. The fundraising marathon, which will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center, is shooting to corral between $2 million and $3 million, according to Romney fundraisers.
Read all of iWatch News’ political coverage.
The day’s fundraising begins at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time to hit up East Coast donors early. It will include big-name Romney bundlers from around the