Wednesday-Night

Sahel Africans Face Hunger Despite Bumper Harvest
(Planet Ark/Reuters) DAKAR - Poor people in Africa’s arid Sahel region will go without food despite bumper harvests this year, as wild price moves on world markets put staple cereals beyond many families’ budgets, aid agencies say. Prices of imported foods have ballooned in recent years, pushing up […]

More on Water and on Wednesday-Night.com     
Thirst a powerful slide show on water
Water: A finite resource (with pictures and graphs)
Although water covers 75 percent of the world’s surface, 97.5 percent of the earth’s water is salt water; of the remaining 2.5 percent, most is locked away as groundwater or in glaciers.
Water for Food, […]

We return to some semblance of normality this Wednesday after last week’s back-to-back evenings, with the happy and historic events of  Tuesday’s Election Night followed by Wednesday Night ’s more traditional – and certainly more sober – discussion of the economy, along with the huge challenges facing President-elect Obama. One […]

Frank Kinnelly writes: Here’s a link to the candidates’ responses to a series of questions on science policy.  Note that you can click on a link giving the responses side-by-side.  Note that Obama’s goals for reducing GHG are far more ambitious than McCain’s.
The world’s poor deserve better US leadership
The US election has implications for science […]

See also Global Monitoring Report 2008
More on Wednesday-night.com
Sub-Saharan Africa is a highly complex Region of 47 countries with 7 distinctly different colonial histories. It is also highly diverse, with more than 700 million people of at least 1,000 different ethnic groups. The Region is a critical development priority—it has some of the world’s poorest countries […]

We are delighted to hear from former (because they moved to Toronto) Wednesday Nighters Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu about the book they have just published. We look forward to reading it.
Yes We Have No Bananas: A Critique of the Food Mile Perspective
Hiroko Shimizu, […]

See also U.S. campaign 2008
Buckley Bows out at National Review After Endorsing Obama (Daily Beast)
Christopher Buckley: Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing […]

The Food issue
Farmer in Chief
(NYT Magazine) … with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to […]

What we were learning — through The New York Times, Newsweek and Roll Call — was ugly. Davis Manafort, the lobbying firm owned by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac from late 2005 until last month. This was in addition to the $30,000 a month that […]

With thanks to Foad Mardukhi, our inimitable source of great information.
Feeling No Pain
PAUL KRUGMAN
(NYT) My first reaction to Bill Clinton’s convention speech was sheer professional jealousy: nobody, but nobody, has his ability to translate economic wonkery into plain, forceful English. In effect, Mr. Clinton provided an executive summary of the […]