Devinder Sharma, NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2013 : "India, a country which lived in the shadows of a ship-to-mouth existence when food would go directly from the ship to hungry mouths has over the years emerged self-sufficient in food production. This historic turnaround was possible only because India had adopted the two planks of what I call a remarkable famine-avoidance strategy: providing farmers with an assured price support for their produce, and introducing a food procurement system that provided for a guaranteed market and at the same time helped get food to the poor in the deficit regions through a network of ration shops. Withdrawing the price support for farmers or freezing it at the de-minimis level of 10 percent as applicable under the Agreement on Agriculture will make farmers vulnerable to the vagaries of the market."
“world literature” is like happiness: you might possibly achieve it, but not by aiming to." "That no one can say where The Trial and The Castle take place helps add these books to World Literature." "Freud had described a related phenomenon: plumb individual pathology deeply enough and you emerge in an underground realm of universal mythology."
NYT 20.3.13 by D Garnier: "It's not often you open a book, flip to its title page, and read a declaration like the one printed here: "Copyright denied by Kirill Medvedev, 2012." He's opted out of the literary world. He's decided that his books will appear in pirate editions or not at all. Mr. Medvedev notes, in an observation that hangs over this book, "It's strange now to think that business was once portrayed as the enemy of authority." "
Publishers Weekly, By Andrew Richard Albanese | Jul 26, 2010 Includes a 9 min Youtube presentation byCalifornia entrepreneur Jared Friedman, chief technology officer of "social publisher" Scribd, plus an interview with the same.
Publisher's Weekly By Peter Brantley | Nov 29, 2013 "It is hard to understand what the Authors Guild hopes to achieve by continuing the litigation. In a dramatically changing landscape where authors can now easily self-publish, bypassing existing publishing houses, yet where a new ecosystem supporting the creative arts does not wholly exist, can the guild not find more pressing needs on which to spend its time and resources than the digitization of out-of-print library books?"
Today in Geneva, WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo announced that governments have failed to reach agreement on a “Bali package” in advance of the December 3-6 Ministerial meeting in that city. The Council of Canadians, along with the global Our World Is Not For Sale (OWINFS) network, which has long opposed the talks on "trade facilitation" (see June letter), celebrated this outcome, while urging governments to focus their time in Bali on making permanent changes to WTO rules to allow developing countries to pursue food security.
Zero to book in 5 days. Seem impossible? Its not, its very possible, fun, and extremely rewarding. There are three important outcomes from Book Sprints: * Producing a book * Sharing knowledge * Team/community building
"Internet security is hard," he says with emphasis. "All systems have undiscovered holes in them, and it's only a question of how fast the bad guys can discover the holes compared with how fast the good guys can patch them up."
Moscow Times 3 October 2013 A subsidiary of Rosatom signed a contract with the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission on Wednesday to design the Rooppur nuclear power plant, the first of its kind in a country plagued with electricity shortages. Scheduled for completion by 2020, Russia may also provide up to $10 billion for the plant's construction.
Moscow Times 3 July 2013 "Fennovoima, Finland's No. 3 nuclear power company, has signed a project development agreement with Rusatom Overseas, a subsidiary of state-owned nuclear energy firm Rosatom, to build the Hanhikivi 1 nuclear power plant unit." "Fennovoima CEO Juha Nurmi told Reuters that Rosatom's medium-sized reactor turned out to be more suitable for its needs than Toshiba's and said Rosatom's interest in taking a stake in the project also played a role. A final decision on the supplier for the nuclear power unit is to be made by the end of the year by Fennovoima's 60 owners..."
15min.lt 19 Sep -13 on the Baltic Nuclear Power Plant: "The state has nationalized a 259-hectare lot between the rivers of Šešupė and Įsrutis, about 140 kilometres from the city of Kaliningrad Russian nuclear energy giant Rosatom spares neither trouble nor expense to dispel the many doubts about its future nuclear power plant in Kaliningrad, despite the fact that the company started the large-scale construction without having any investors or electricity sale deals. "
YLE/Jaana Kivi 15.11.2013 " Monikansallisten yritysten toimitusjohtajat on koottu neuvottelemaan siitä, kuinka he parhaiten voivat edistää omaa toimintaansa - Marko Juutinen, Attac
A decade after the FBI found ties between a Saudi family living quietly near Sarasota and the 9/11 hijackers, a Florida Democratic congresswoman is calling on the House Intelligence Committee to investigate whether agents revealed their findings to Congress.Kathy Castor said she was troubled over reports that federal agents discovered a luxury home where the family was living was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers and phone calls were linked between the home and the terrorists, but Congress was not told of the discovery. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into the deadly hijackings, said he was never told about the case, while the FBI, in a statement released Friday, said the agency did indeed tell Congress and the 911 Commission.