THE NEW YORK TIMES – Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali troops, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to American and Western officials.

The disclosure comes as Mr. Prince sells off his interest in the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, work that mired him in lawsuits and investigations amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including causing the deaths of civilians in Iraq. His efforts to wade into the chaos of Somalia appear to be Mr. Prince’s latest endeavor to remain at the center of a campaign against Islamic radicalism in some of the world’s most war-ravaged corners. Mr. Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates late last year.

With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. The Somali government has been cornered in a small patch of Mogadishu by the Shabab, a Somali militant group with ties to Al Qaeda.

This, along with the growing menace of piracy off Somalia’s shores, has created an opportunity for private security companies like the South African firm Saracen International to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war. It is another illustration of how private security firms are playing a bigger role in wars around the world, with some governments seeing them as a way to supplement overtaxed armies, while others complain that they are unaccountable.

Click to continue reading full article on founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, backing Somalia mercenaries.

Article by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt

© NY TIMES, 2011

THE GLOBE AND MAIL INC – In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline.

This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

Continue reading about A Brave New World of Fossil Fuels on Demand.

Article by Neil Reynolds

© The Globe and Mail, Inc., 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Photograph by flickr user Ben Seidelman

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel is to approve 1,400 new settler homes in east Jerusalem, media and the local council said on Sunday, defying pressure to halt settlement building that has stalled peace talks with the Palestinians.

The massive construction project will add homes to the annexed east Jerusalem settlement neighbourhood of Gilo and is expected to receive final approval from the district planning commission within days.

The project is likely to spark condemnation from the international community, which has repeatedly called on Israel to avoid new building projects in mainly Arab east Jerusalem.

Jerusalem’s municipal council in a statement confirmed the project, but said it was part of a long-standing policy to expand housing availability for the city’s Jewish and Arab residents.

“There has been no change in the policy towards construction in Jerusalem for the last 40 years,” it said. “The Jerusalem municipality continues to promote both Jewish and Arab construction in the city.”

Click to continue reading about settlement project in East Jerusalem.

© COPYRIGHT AFP, 2011

Photograph by flickr user moty66ipernity

THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS, THE MOVIE – Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm — an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Zac Goldsmith and Samdhong Rinpoche – the Prime Minister of Tibet’s government in exile. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. The Economics of Happiness restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

© 2011 The Economics of Happiness

Photograph by Xanetia

LIVE SCIENCE – Ten things you didn’t know about the brain…

10. Human brains are big…

The average adult brain weighs just under 3 pounds (between 1.3 and 1.4 kilograms). Some neurosurgeons describe the texture of a living brain as that of toothpaste, but according to neurosurgeon Katrina Firlik, a better analogy can be found in the local health-food store.

“[The brain] doesn’t spread like toothpaste. It doesn’t adhere to your fingers the way toothpaste does,” Firlik writes in her memoir, “Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside” (Random House, 2006). “Tofu — the soft variety, if you know tofu — may be a more accurate comparison.”

If you aren’t charmed by that description, consider this: About 80 percent of the contents of your cranium is brain, while equal amounts of blood and cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that buffers neural tissue, make up the rest. If you were to blend up all of that brain, blood and fluid, it would come to about 1.7 liters, or not quite enough to fill a 2-liter soda bottle.

9. …But they’re getting smaller

Don’t get too cocky about your soda-bottle-sized brain. Humans 5,000 years ago had brains that were even larger.

Continue reading about 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain.

© Copyright Live Science, 2011

Photograph by moujemouje