Global

Rust In The Bread Basket

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Rust in the bread basketA crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areasJul 1st 2010IT IS sometimes called the “polio of agriculture”: a terrifying but almost forgotten disease. Wheat rust is not just back after a 50-year absence, but spreading in new and scary forms. In some ways it is worse than child-crippling polio, still lingering in parts of Nigeria. Wheat rust has spread silently and speedily by 5,000 miles in a decade. It is now camped at the gates of one of the world’s breadbaskets, Punjab.

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Security Tops The Environment In China’s Energy Plan

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Color China Photo, via Associated PressA worker walks past solar panels at a solar farm in Shilin, China.By KEITH BRADSHERBEIJING — When President Obama called this week for a “national mission” to expand the u

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Emerging Renewables To Have More Profile In Next Statistical Review

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The ‘Statistical Review of World Energy’ does not include wind, solar or geothermal in its primary energy forecast, but these sources will be added next year because they are reaching “sufficient weight in a number of countries.”

Hydroelectricity and nuclear remain the largest non-fossil fuels in the world, with a combined share of 12% in primary energy, explains BP’s chief economist Christof Rühl in the 2010 Review.

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Melting Glaciers And Snow Put Millions At Risk In Asia

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From: David Fogarty, Reuters Increased melting of glaciers and snow in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau threatens the food security of millions of people in Asia, a study shows, with Pakistan likely to be among the nations hardest hit. A team of scientists in Holland studied the impacts of climate change on five major Asian rivers on which about 1.4 billion people, roughly a fifth of humanity, depend for water to drink and to irrigate crops.

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Global Arms Spending Tops $1.6T

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The Associated PressArmed soldiers on guard in Kingston, Jamaica, in May 2010. (Associated Press)Despite the global financial crisis, world military spending almost doubled in the past decade to reach $1.6 trillion Cdn in 2009, a Swedish think-tank said Wednesday. In its 2010 yearbook, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, said that spending between 2008 and 2009 grew 5.9 per cent. The United States remains the biggest spender, accounting for some 54 per cent of the increase, the report said.

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Cars And People Compete For Grain

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Lester R. Brown

At a time when excessive pressures on the earth’s land and water resources are of growing concern, there is a massive new demand emerging for cropland to produce fuel for cars—one that threatens world food security. Although this situation had been developing for a few decades, it was not until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when oil prices jumped above $60 a barrel and U.S. gasoline prices climbed to $3 a gallon, that the situation came into focus. Suddenly investments in U.S.

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