Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.
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If our profits are taxed, that means we’ll have less capital to invest in new production.

— John Hofmeister, president of Shell U.S., to CNNMoney.com; May 6.

These companies are spending a very small amount of their operating cash flow on exploration. They are spending the majority of their funds buying back stock.

— Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, discussing results of her just-finished a two-year study looking at oil companies and how they spend their money; May 6.
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In a garbage dump in Haiti, people scavenge for food.

They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.

— Saint Louis Meriska of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, whose “children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day”; food prices in Haiti have spiked 45 percent since 2006; April 18.
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This is actually a boost to remind people that we can produce this kind of journalism at any time. We’re going to have a large enough newsroom to continue to produce this kind of quality journalism.

— Leonard Downie Jr., editor of The Washington Post, winner of six Pulitzer Prizes for 2008; The Post’s front-page story by media critic Howard Kurtz did not mention the paper has endured three rounds of staff cuts since 2003, but the AP’s story did; April 7; emphasis added.

I can only confirm that the route is dynamic.

— Nathan Ballard, a San Francisco city spokesman, as, said The New York Times, “The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China’s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet”; April 9.
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It’s a pleasure to watch Obama’s mastery of the technique. And Clinton — and I didn’t say “even Clinton” — uses it much better than McCain does. And just about everybody does it better than the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq. Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.

— from a New York Times commentary by Dick Cavett discussing President Bush’s public speaking skills; March 28.
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If it was the Marlins, you wouldn’t see people in Florida getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was the Yankees — well, their fans aren’t real. They just buy the hat.

— Helio Rocha, a restaurant manager who stayed up all night in anticipation of watching the Red Sox’ Major League Baseball opener (played in Toyko) at 5:30 a.m. in famed Boston watering hole Cask ’n’ Flagon; March 26.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

— from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Dealbook” column in The New York Times; March 25; emphasis added.
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Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, believes that a Yahoo / Microsoft tie-up would be awful for the Internet. Schmidt issued the vague sequitur that we should all beware of, “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone.” Of course, everyone knows that Microsoft is the Great Satan, so it stands to reason that anything they do should be regarded as automatically the equivalent of making baby stew.

Here, though, it is Google - owner of 62.9% of all Internet searches ($16.4 bn in ad revenue) - which dwarfs any tie up (Yahoo-Microsoft have a combined search share of 15.7% and $ 9.8 bn in ad revenue). Could it be that Google is trying to pull a Microsoft and protect its home-turf advantage from a healthy rival? Full Story »

Newly minted New York governor David Paterson and his wife had extra-marital affairs. Former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey says he and his wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, engaged in three-way sex with his ex-aide and driver; Mrs. McGreevey says they didn’t. Meanwhile, the McGreeveys’ high-profile, salacious divorce case remains nightly news in the Garden State.

The dissection of disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, continues. On “Larry King Live,” a 15-minute, 47-second segment discusses how to catch cheating spouses.

CNN’s “Quick Vote” question today asks: “If a politician is unfaithful in his or her private life, do you think that impacts their ability to be honest in public life?” (At this writing, 54 percent voted yes.)

And it’s ho, ho, ho everywhere as “serious” journalists interview prostitutes, including discussion of their high-tech improvements and former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss proclaiming, “Dude, these are men.”
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China is rapidly becoming Africa's largest investor. They require little in the way of good governance and are aggressively creating new infrastructure in their drive to secure resources for their own industrial expansion. This offers both risks and opportunities for Africa. Once China becomes the most visible investor in Africa it also implies that their assets will be targeted by activists and opportunists.

Download the podcast: China in Africa.

The World Future Energy Summit is taking place this week in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Conference topics include solar and wind power, clean transportation, carbon, waste-to-fuel conversion, biofuels, geothermal and other energy sources. There’s also an exhibition where 214 corporations, NGOs, media groups, financial institutions, and government organizations are showing off their latest “future energy” options. Included are five national pavilions where national governments are hosting even more of their local companies, and exhibitions range from new energy generation techniques to energy efficiency technologies to carbon offsets (the conference itself is being billed as carbon neutral, via the CarbonNeutral Company). This conference and exhibition is being paid for and hosted by Abu Dhabi, an emirate that is wealthy precisely because of the vast reserves of carbon - in the form of oil - beneath its desert and coast. Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced that his government would offer a $2.2 million prize “to three individuals or organizations that have made significant contributions in the global response to the future of energy”, to be judged by an international panel of environmental and energy experts. Other information to come out of the conference already include and agreement between Iceland and Djibouti to supply Djibouti with geothermal energy and subsequently displace of the diesel generators that currently power most of the small nation’s electricity. Full Story »

One of my first pieces on Barack Obama was critical of his tone-deaf attitude on the safety of imported products made in China and other countries–an issue which has vaulted into the public eye due to the strings of recalls of products because of lead toxicity, manufacturing defects, and a million other deaths by a thousand cuts.

Well, it seems that he has listened to the outcries and modified his stance considerably, because he advanced a proposal last week to double the funding of the Consumer Product Safety Commission if he is elected President: Full Story »

Over the past two months a tragedy has been playing out in Europe and the US. Mattel, the world’s largest toymaker, has recalled more than 20 million of their products, including Fisher Price and Barbie.

The cause? Toys with paint containing too high a lead content and poorly attached magnets that could present a choking hazard to tiny tots.

Mattel was quick to cast the blame at their largest manufacturers in China. EU and US politicians promptly suggested unilateral bans on Chinese-made goods and trade restrictions at all levels. Zhang Shuhong, the head of Lida and one of the biggest Mattel suppliers, committed suicide.

Off the back of the melamine-pet-food scandal a few months ago China is taking severe punishment for their behaviour. Is it justified? Full Story »

I’ve been trying to embrace the idea of a Barack Obama presidency. The guy strikes a lot of the right notes–eloquent, charismatic, smart, persuasive, idealistic–and has a lot of the right positions (Against the Iraq war, against the bankruptcy bill, etc.), but sometimes that whole “inexperience” meme that gets tossed around where he’s concerned demonstrates a grain of truth. Full Story »

And Brian will be back in our next hour with a look at the life- and-death question that is now being asked in Utah. Is it possible for those trapped miners to still be alive?

Well, they are cute, colorful, and they may be dangerous to your kids. Mattel is recalling more than 20 million toys made in China. They include Polly Pocket dolls, Batman action figures, and Sarge toy cars.

— a transition from a Aug. 14 story on six miners trapped more than week at a Utah mine to a story on the recall of children’s toys tainted by lead paint, by Suzanne Malveaux, subbing for Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”

There is absolutely no excuse for lead to be found in toys entering this country. It is totally unacceptable and it needs to stop.

— an Aug. 14 comment on CNN by Nancy Nord, acting chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency with 400 full-time staff, halved primarily during the Reagan administration because of industry complaints about the agency, and whose most recent nominee as chair was pulled by President Bush “after strong opposition from some Senate Democrats because of his career as a manufacturers’ lobbyist.”
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Timothy Balding, CEO of the World Association of Newspapers, is no softy. Neither are any of the other 1 600 journalists and news editors from around the world gathered in Cape Town at the 60th World Annual Newspaper Congress.

Yet Balding was not alone in wiping eyes blinded by tears during the presentation of the Golden Pen award.

The Pen is presented annually by WAN to honour the journalist who, against great odds, has done the most to champion the cause of free speech. This year it went to Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. And today, 4 June, is the 18th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

You may never have heard of him, but Shi is the first casualty in new-media’s complicity in yielding up its users to brutal regimes. Shi is currently serving a ten-year sentence for distributing Chinese state secrets. What secrets?

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According to Deutsche Welle this morning, the official Chinese position on economic growth and global heating is that economic growth trumps global heating.

“There is especially no research that details the economic impact of a two-degree restriction, nor what kind of influence such a target would bring on the development of each nation.” (Ma Kai, the minister of China’s key Reform and Development Commission, quoted from Deutsche Welle’s article above)

According to the IPCC report that China signed last month, the cost in global economic growth is expected to be approximately 0.12 percent growth in GDP. Note that this simply a slowdown in the current rate of growth, not an actual shrinkage in GDP.

Ma is either misinformed or is outright lying. Full Story »

A friend of my former father-in-law told me what he considered a humorous anecdote once that has haunted me ever since:

I was an active member of an organization of retired executives who traveled to developing countries to serve as business advisers for their budding industries. I’d been particularly successful helping a couple of Latin American countries get some construction equipment companies up and running and I was invited to NYC for an organization awards dinner at which I was to be recognized with an award for my work. I arrived at the last minute from Brazil and hadn’t even seen a copy of the program. I was seated at the head table just as the meal began - right next to a little Chinese guy who nodded and smiled but who didn’t seem to speak English. As we began with our soup, I decided to try to make some conversation. “Likee the soup?” I said. The little man nodded and smiled…. Full Story »

In 2005 a major media company with an international presence handed information on the activities of its journalists to an autocratic police state. A few of these journalists were subsequently arrested, tortured, and imprisoned.

One journalist was Shi Tao. The police state is China. And the media company is Yahoo.

Imagine this had been the New York Times? Full Story »

In 1993 France instituted the European Banana Regime placing quotas on banana imports from outside of their trade preference agreements with Europe’s old colonial trading partners, the African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. The big losers were Latin American farmers.

Germany, joining the European Union in 1987, and with no historical colonies to protect, was suddenly restricted from importing (to them) cheaper, tastier and larger bananas from Latin America in favour of the ACP imports. The case went to GATT (now the World Trade Organisation).

France declared that they were simply preventing toxic products from entering their market; citing evidence that Costa Rica used harmful pesticides and degraded the environment through their agricultural practices. That Costa Rica was improving its farming techniques, and that the ACP countries were even worse than Latin America was moot.

It was flagrant protectionism and resulted in years of jokes about France banning bananas based on their curvature.

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We’ve been hearing a lot in the news about melamine ever since it was directly implicated in the deaths thousands of pets. The latest news is that melamine has apparently entered the human food supply in the United States. As a result, there have been calls to give the FDA new enforcement powers and even suggestions that this could lead to a trade war with China. While the melamine contamination/adulteration of gluten and vegetable protein from China is a very serious issue, I believe that it’s past time that someone inject some perspective into this debate. Full Story »