Haiti: protesters demand food
Some 5,000 protesters shut down the southern Haitian city of Les Cayes on April 3 in a dramatic demonstration against President Rene Preval’s government for failing to slow the rising cost of food and other staple products; they also protested the local administration’s failure to maintain roads. From early in the morning people barricaded streets with burning tires, forcing stores, banks and schools to close down in the city, the country’s third largest. While many people demonstrated peacefully, others looted food and containers of cement from trucks and warehouses. Some protesters raided the offices of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in the Breset neighborhood, carrying away computers and other office equipment. Two MINUSTAH vehicles were set on fire.
Official sources said on April 3 that there were no major injuries in the Les Cayes protests, and MINUSTAH spokesperson Fred Blaise claimed that crowds were under control by the end of the day. Sources in Les Cayes gave a different story, reporting that the disturbances continued into April 4 and that two people were shot dead and 18 were injured, 12 of them by bullets, during the 48 hours of demonstrations. Some people put the number of the dead at four; one of those killed was said to be named Jean Baptiste Zary. There were conflicting reports on who was responsible for the shooting, although some people in Les Cayes blamed soldiers trying to drive back the demonstrators. On April 4 Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis confirmed one death.
Demonstrations against the high cost of living—laviche (”expensive life”) in Creole—broke out in other areas. Hundreds protested on April 3 in Gonaives on the northwest coast. The protests there were largely peaceful, but United Nations workers were evacuated to a police base, and five people were injured with rocks as protesters tired to force the Frabre Geffrard high school’s administration to let the students join the demonstrations. Gonaives is Haiti’s fourth largest city. Protests started in the southern city of Petit-Goave on April 4 as demonstrators tried to close schools and bring out students. Students marched in downtown Port-au-Prince the same day to protest the cost of living.
Tags: haiti, news
The subject only Ron Paul supporters are talking about: government intervention:* Causing inflation* Subsidizing bullshit like corn* Fighting wars (Pentagon consumes 400K barrels of oil a day* Capping efficiency - limiting trade
Yes well, I was thinking of denuding of Crete back in classical times. But maybe it wasn’t Crete. Was it Sicily? Hmmm. Scotland has been thoroughly denuded…
I suppose you could get a cow drunk off of ethanol and it could process some of the calories. It would be very unhealthy, but I’d love to see the youtube video. (not that I’d condone it)
Why do we still listen to Paul Krugman? The man has had more failed predictions than Lady Cleo on the Cleveland Astrology Hotline.
Funny. My wife and I just decided to have lunch at the diner here in town rather than driving 20 minutes to someplace different partly because it would save on gas.And then I see this.
Like I said - $4 loaves of bread.
Yes to your first sentence. Your second sentence is wrong: the current warming is human-caused. The science is pretty clear on this. And whether we can change course in time to avert catastrophe is not yet known; all that we can say with certainty is that we are very close to the brink.
Before the green revolution, even rich people paid a lot of money for food.This concept of cheap food a is a recent thing.
It would seem that too many of a species is when the eco-system can no longer support them.In homo sapiens case, they have developed the necessary technologies, and in some segments of the population, demonstrated the sufficient comprehension of inter-relatedness to attune themselves to their environment. However, an insufficient number has, as-of-yet, done so and thus we see unpretty pictures like the ones you’ve linked.That, in-and-of-itself, is an argument for the collective homo sapiens’ stupidity, rather than their over-population.Perhaps we have more mutual thought-space than you first thought. For certainly, if the homo sapiens are too stupid to sufficiently apply the technologies they already possess, they will find themselves unable to exist in their environment, and the definition of over-populated.However, the capability is there. What they choose to do with it, remains to be seen.edit: knowing is half the battle
The subject no one will talk about, interstellar colonization.
The subject no one will talk about, Candlejack.
I’d actually argue coal is less harmful to the world as a whole than Ethanol in will be in the long run. The most seductive myth about ethanol is that it will free us from our dependence on foreign oil. But even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day — only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use. Another misconception is that ethanol is green. In fact, corn production depends on huge amounts of fossil fuel — not just the diesel needed to plow fields and transport crops, but also the vast quantities of natural gas used to produce fertilizers. Runoff from industrial-scale cornfields also silts up the Mississippi River and creates a vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. What’s more, when corn ethanol is burned in vehicles, it is as dirty as conventional gasoline and does little to solve global warming: E85 reduces carbon dioxide emissions by a modest fifteen percent at best, while fueling the destruction of tropical forests. But the biggest problem with ethanol is that it steals vast swaths of land that might be better used for growing food. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs titled “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor,” University of Minnesota economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer point out that filling the gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn — roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year.All in all we’re just pretending it’s the solution to our problem, when really, it’s just preventing us from taking real steps to solve the problem thus making it worse in the end.
Uhh,I think a big mac near me is already over $4. (not the meal, just the burger). The meal is $6.