MicroHawk's NewsScan

The Revolution Will Be Published - The ITT List

The 43rd annual Cairo International Book Fair was supposed to take place last January, but there was a revolution instead. So it's back this year, having opened this week for a 15-day run.

How is the post-revolutionary book fair different? Unlike previous years, there is no list of banned books that publishers may not display. Tunisian publishers were named guests of honor, to pay homage to the country that began the wave of revolutions across the Arab World last year, and the fair's opening ceremonies were led by the Egyptian and Tunisian ministers of culture.

via inthesetimes.com

Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima | | AlterNet

In the end, the answer to the mystery of why nuclear power in the United States is still afloat comes down to money.

via www.alternet.org

Eco-Economy Indicators - Grain Harvest - Bumper 2011 Grain Harvest Fails to Rebuild Global Stocks | EPI

The world’s farmers produced more grain in 2011 than ever before. Estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show the global grain harvest coming in at 2,295 million tons, up 53 million tons from the previous record in 2009. Consumption grew by 90 million tons over the same period to 2,280 million tons. Yet with global grain production actually falling short of consumption in 7 of the past 12 years, stocks remain worryingly low, leaving the world vulnerable to food price shocks.

via www.earth-policy.org

New Website Aims To Be Appalachia's Own WikiLeaks - NewsChannel5.com

A handful of freelance journalists and computer programmers are launching what they hope will become Appalachia's own version of WikiLeaks, a website where government and corporate whistle blowers can anonymously share documents.

via www.newschannel5.com

See Honest Appalachia's Press Release: they will launch officially in a couple of minutes, at noon eastern time.

America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible? | | AlterNet

Thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are quietly beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economic system.

via www.alternet.org

Banyan: The Fukushima black box | The Economist

A dangerous lack of urgency in drawing lessons from Japan’s nuclear disaster

via www.economist.com

Austerity Plans Are Based on the Wrong Diagnosis of the Wrong Problem -- And May Plunge Europe into Depression | | AlterNet

Private investment spending is cyclical in nature -- too much during up-boom periods and too little during down periods. That’s why government spending must act as a counter-balance. Instead, what we have seen is government actions fueling private sector spending (with lower interest rates and lower taxes) in boom periods (like the 1990s), and now withdrawing spending during the recessionary period when there is not enough private investment.

This is exactly the opposite of what should happen.

via www.alternet.org

Go Away, Daddy! The Revolting Bob Parsons and His Toxic Internet Empire | | AlterNet

If unbridled capitalism is the plague, Go Daddy Founder Bob Parsons and his horrible company are the infected boils on the body politic.

via www.alternet.org

ALEC - America’s Secret Political Power | Truthout

There’s something rotten in the air. A muggy, oniony, chemical smell that wafts over the lines of uniformed riot police, paddy wagons and metal barriers that are holding back a straggle of protesters waving slapdash placards reading “Shut Down ALEC.”

“Get back ma’am, for your own safety,” a courteous voice warns me. “They’re gonna start pepper spraying.”

via www.truth-out.org

When Economics Gets Political | Truthout

David Warsh finally says what someone needed to say: Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.

“Certainly Hayek made a big impression on me and my friends, when, as young men, we read him in the 1970s,” Mr. Warsh, a journalist, wrote on his Web site, EconomicPrincipals.com, earlier this month. “We felt the same way about the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. With the passage of time, though, 19th-century liberalism has seemed, by itself, a less and less adequate framework with which to deal with the problems of the 21st century.”

via www.truth-out.org