The sugar industry produces food, fuel and environmental benefits.

How fast it grows may depend on an argument about how it should be regulated?

From the Economist, Sept 2, 2010

IT IS what passes for a winter’s day in upstate São Paulo. The sun is blazing from a blue sky feathered lightly with cirrus cloud. In a large, sloping field overlooking the city of Piracicaba, a mechanical harvester chomps through a stand of three-metre-high sugar cane, fat and juicy from months of sunshine. The harvester slices the cane into 20cm chunks and regurgitates them into a 30-tonne trailer moving alongside that will lug them a few kilometres to the Costa Pinto mill (pictured). There the cane is weighed, washed, tipped onto a conveyor belt, crushed and then, depending on market conditions, crystallised into sugar or distilled into ethanol. The woody residue—the bagaço—is burned in two high-pressure boilers that, according to the flickering needle in the control room, are supplying around 50 megawatts (MW) of electricity to the local grid—enough to power half of Piracicaba. Read more »

This is an essay by Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Professor of comparative politics at University of California, Berkeley.

“…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”– Sigmund Freud.

On assuming office, President Obama shifted US military action from Iraq to Afghanistan and then, more squarely, to Pakistan, where he claimed the terrorists responsible for 911 were hiding. In doing so, he tacitly acknowledged the nefarious character of the rationales of the Bush administration in invading Iraq, rationales that are now widely accepted as being cynical fabrications to wage a war that was planned well before the Trade Towers were destroyed.

Read more »

Political analysts and media, particularly those who do not see the link between 9/11, War on Terror, and US foreign policy, should take a note of the following apparently innocuous Bloomberg story about the oil activity in Iraq.  Between bigotry and paranoia of the right-wingers and the blissful ignorance of the ‘Burger Generation’ there is a real world out there - driven by self-interests. Economic interests overshadow most interests.

Points to be noted about this story:

1. Iraq’s crude oil output is projected to increase by five times to equal that of Saudi Arabia

2. The biggest oil servicing and drilling companies are rapidly expanding operations in Iraq.

3. The British Petroleum (BP) is developing the Rumaila oil field, which, according to BP, may become the second largest oil field in the world after Ghawar (located in the Eastern provinces) of Saudi Arabia. Read more »

The News

Tuesday, March 23, 2010
By Saad Hasan

SUI: Hundreds of junior-cadre workers of the state-run Pakistan Petroleum (PPL) became millionaires overnight after getting ownership certificates of their company under the Benazir Employees Stock Option scheme. Read more »

From The Atlantic Free Press

by Peter Chamberlin

By following the trail of militant terrorists US forces and American interests have gained access deep in Central Asia, where oil companies have had little luck gaining a foothold on their own. Read more »

By Katherine Shaver
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2010

Thousands of demonstrators protested the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Saturday in a march through downtown Washington. Many expressed concern that health care and the dismal economy have begun to overshadow the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read more »

General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged in his book, ‘In the Line of Fire’, that Omar Saeed Sheikh - the man who was convicted for killing Daniel Pearl, Wall Street Journal’s correspondent, in 2002 - was recruited by MI6, the British intelligence agency.

We also know that Omar Saeed Sheikh conducted terrorist strikes in India and was also very close to the sectarian terrorist outfits in Pakistan besides being very close to the former Intelligence Bureau Head, Brig. (rtd) Ijaz Shah.  Omar Saeed was also linked (in the reports of the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, ABC News, among others) to transferring $100,000 to Mohd. Atta, who allegedly led the hijackings of 9/11. Read more »

We have been able to secure an electronic version of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s Book, America’s “War on Terrorism”. This book is not available in Pakistan though it can be ordered through Amazon.com. You can download this as a pdf file.

DOWNLOAD BOOK

The book starts with a reference to a report by Dan Rather of CBS News [ CBS Evening News with Dan Rather;  CBS, January 28, 2002] that on September 10, 2001 Osama bin Laden had been admitted to a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi. What follows is a massive documentary evidence work according to Amazon.com 

Michel Chossudovsky is professor of economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Canada and author of several books. He is Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), a think-tank based in Montreal.  He has taught as visiting professor at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia, has acted as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has worked as a consultant for international organizations including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the African Development Bank, the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (AIEDEP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 

Read more »

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Read more »

Read more »

From Army Times, USA 

Critics: Afghanistan plan takes SF from usual training mission 

By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Dec 23, 2008 13:30:19 EST 

Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ announcement of a plan to deploy an additional three brigades of combat troops to Afghanistan by the summer has superseded a contentious debate that pitted the Bush administration’s “war czar” against the special operations hierarchy over the National Security Council’s proposed near-term “surge” of special operations forces to Afghanistan, a Pentagon military official said.

Read more »

10/23/2008 11:55 PM | By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News

Iran’s opposition appears to be a major reason why, after eight months of arduous negotiations, the United States and Iraq have so far failed to reach agreement on a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), although such an agreement is urgently required. The UN Resolution, which authorised the deployment of US and Coalition forces in Iraq, expires on December 31. Read more »

By Yousuf Nazar

The current received wisdom in the United States is that the militants in northwest Pakistan have provided safe havens to Al Qaeda has along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the greatest threat to America’s security comes from this region. No US official or journalist or think-tank has ever raised or answered the question that Alan Greenspan posed in his book, The Age of Turbulence: Read more »

By Gideon Rachman

Chief foreign affairs columnist, the Financial Times

Published: May 13 2008

With the oil price heading upwards and President George W. Bush heading for Saudi Arabia, as part of a Middle Eastern tour, it is time to accept the truth. The pursuit of oil is fundamental to US foreign policy. Read more »