I know what nobody knows
Where it comes and where it goes
I know its everybodys sin
You got to lose to know how to win
The New Economics of Hunger
A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most.
The globe’s worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America’s great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.
In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect — one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam’s Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.
USA
Letters Give C.I.A. Tactics a Legal Rationale
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.
The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.
If Clinton can’t run campaign, can she run White House?
WASHINGTON – Despite Hillary Clinton’s big win in Pennsylvania last week, the story of her campaign is often one of mismanagement and missed opportunities, and it raises questions about how she’d organize and run the White House.
“There’s a certain style to the campaign, and it shows what we might expect in a Clinton presidency: a lot of viewpoints and a messiness,” said James McCann, a political science professor at Purdue University in Indiana.Whether that’s a good or bad trait is in the eye of the analyst. McCann called it “policymaking through trial and error,” similar to how Bill Clinton ran his administration, which to many was a big success.
But her campaign tumbled from riches to rags to rebounds – and now to hanging on for dear life. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
Not many months ago, Clinton was the consensus front-runner, with a 30-point lead in national polls, $118 million raised in 2007 and the backing of most Democratic power brokers
Middle East
Hizbollah builds up covert army for a new assault against Israel
Villages empty as Shia militia sends recruits to tough training camps in Bekaa Valley, Syria and Iran, reports Mitchell Prothero in southern Lebanon
The dead of southern Lebanon watch the living from the sides of buildings and from lampposts, their faces staring out defiantly from posters, heads often superimposed on bodies of generic men in uniform. These are Hizbollah’s martyrs: men killed fighting against Israel before it abandoned the occupation of the south in 2000 or in the numerous clashes since, including the bloody summer war of 2006.The images are often the only public acknowledgement of the individuals who make up this most secretive of institutions: Hizbollah’s military wing.
But an Observer investigation has discovered that this covert organisation is quietly but steadily replacing its dead and redoubling its recruitment efforts in anticipation of a new, and even more brutal, conflict.
The Iraqi teenage girl killed for loving a British soldier
A 17-year-old Iraqi girl has been murdered by her father in an ‘honour killing’ after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra, The Observer can reveal.
Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman she knew as Paul. Rand, who met the soldier while working on an aid project for displaced families, was suffocated by her father and then hacked at with a knife. All the time he was calling out that his honour was being cleansed, said Rand’s mother.The father was arrested, held for two hours, then released without charge. ‘Not much can be done when we have an “honour killing”,’ said Sgt Ali Jabbar of Basra police. ‘You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws.’
Europe
How do you like your eggs? Read our undercover investigation into Britain’s battery farming
The birds that spend their lives standing on wire mesh without enough space to turn around. Yet three out of five eggs we eat come from farms like these. Martin Hickman reports
Undercover investigators have filmed the ugly reality of egg production at a battery chicken farm supplying the biggest egg producer in the UK.Viewed from the air, Holsworthy Beacon Farm takes its place in an idyllic rural scene. But in its sheds, chickens are crammed five to a cage, stacked in rows from floor to ceiling.
Compassion in World Farming (CIWF), which visited the farm in conjunction with The Independent on Sunday, found hens unable to spread their wings fully, nest, or exhibit other natural behaviour. Some had large bare patches where they had lost their feathers.“As soon as you come in from the fresh air, the smell hits you straight away,” said a CIWF investigator, describing the mixture of animal waste, ammonia and disinfectant emanating from the cages. “If a bird is in the way, the others will clamber over them… It’s a fight for food if they all want to feed at the same time.”
The family-owned farm on Devon’s Exmoor produces more than 100 million eggs a year for Noble Foods, which supplies 70 per cent of the UK egg market.
Conditions at Holsworthy Farm are thought to be legal, and “representative” of conditions at battery chicken plants across the country.
City boy’s survival guide to the gulag
Caught with a tiny amount of cannabis, broker Toby Hague spent 15 months in a brutal Russian jail. It was the making of him
In July 2003 Toby “Tig” Hague – a 31-year-old derivatives broker with a successful career, a beautiful girlfriend and an almighty hangover – arrived at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on a business trip. Groggily he made his way to customs, where an airport official informed him he had too many duty-free items in his bag.At this point the official made a gesture that is understood in most parts of the globe: he rubbed his finger and thumb together. Hague, though, hampered by his Englishness, failed to understand that a bribe was required. A search followed – and about a minute later his rather cocky facade had collapsed.
Asia
Kim Jong-il builds ‘Thunderbirds’ runway for war in North Korea
An airbase inside a mountain is the latest sign that North Korea, whose links to Syria’s nuclear programme came to light last week, is cranking up its military machine
North Korean military engineers are completing an underground runway beneath a mountain that can protect fighter aircraft from attack until they take off at high speed through the mouth of a tunnel.The 6,000ft runway is a few minutes’ flying time from the tense front line where the Korean People’s Army faces soldiers from the United States and South Korea.
The project was identified by an air force defector from North Korea and captured on a satellite image by Google Earth, according to reports in the South Korean press last week.
It is one of three underground fighter bases among an elaborate subterranean military infrastructure built to withstand a “shock and awe” assault in the first moments of a war, the defector said.
Karzai unhurt after parade attack
At least one person has been killed and 11 were hurt in an attack on a military parade in Kabul attended by President Hamid Karzai and other dignitaries.
Security forces whisked Mr Karzai away from the scene and hundreds fled as shots rang out. Two MPs were reported to be among the wounded.The parade was a celebration to mark 16 years since the overthrow of the country’s Soviet-backed rule.
A spokesman for the Taleban said the movement had carried out the attack.
He said six militants had been deployed near the parade with suicide vests and guns. Three of them were killed and the other three arrested, he added.In a live TV address after the incident, Mr Karzai confirmed that there had been arrests.
Africa
In Zimbabwe jail: A reporter’s ordeal
HARARE, Zimbabwe: I had never been arrested before and the prospect of prison in Zimbabwe, one of the poorest, most repressive places on earth, seemed especially forbidding: the squalor, the teeming cells, the possibility of beatings
But I told myself what I’d repeatedly taught my two children: Life is a collection of experiences. You savor the good, you learn from the bad.I was being charged with the crime of “committing journalism.” One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: “You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.”
And I’d been caught at it red-handed, my notes spread across my desk, my text messages readable on my cellphone, my stories preserved by Microsoft Word in an open laptop.
At one point, 21 policemen and detectives milled about my room at a small lodge in Harare, the capital. They knocked against one another as they ambled about, some kneeling, some on tiptoes, searching for clues in the cabinets and drawers. Men with rifles guarded the door.
Tribesman tells of risks he took as a translator in Darfur
Memoir tells of atrocities
When Daoud Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman from Darfur, saw the Eiffel Tower twinkling one night last week in Paris it reminded him of stars in the African desert. “Europe is very nice,” he said, “but I feel very sad to be away from my country.”For the time being, Hari, 35, has no option but exile. He has taken extraordinary risks, coming within seconds of death, to help to draw the world’s attention to the killings in Darfur, western Sudan, as an interpreter for the international press.
Latin America
Massive gunbattles break out in Tijuana; 13 dead, 9 wounded
TIJUANA, Mexico – Massive gunbattles broke out between suspected drug traffickers who fired at each other while speeding down heavily populated streets of this violent border city early Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding nine.
All of the dead were believed to be drug traffickers, possibly rival members of the same cartel who were trying to settle scores, said Rommel Moreno, the attorney general of Baja California state, where Tijuana is located.“Evidently this is a confrontation between gangs,” Moreno told reporters.
Eight suspects and one federal police officer were injured in the pre-dawn shootings, none gravely, said Agustin Perez Aguilar, a spokesman for the state public safety department. The suspects are being held on suspicion of weapons possession among other possible charges.
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