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The Crime of Alleviating Poverty: A Local Community Currency Battles the Central Bank of Kenya

Posted on by Ellen Brown

 

 Former Peace Corps volunteer Will Ruddick and several residents of Bangladesh, Kenya, face a potential seven years in prison after developing a cost-effective way to alleviate poverty in Africa’s poorest slums. Their solution: a complementary currency issued and backed by the local community. The Central Bank of Kenya has now initiated charges of forgery.

Complementary currencies can help eradicate poverty.

Proving that may be difficult in complex economies, due to the high number of factors influencing outcomes. But in an African slum with little of the national currency available, supplying residents with an alternative currency has a positive effect that is obvious, immediate and incontrovertible....

 

FULL ARTICLE HERE

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Global Earthquake Model (GEM)

globalquakemodel.org

GEM is a global collaborative effort with the aim to provide organisations and people with tools and resources for transparent assessment of earthquake risk anywhere in the world. By pooling data, knowledge and people, GEM acts as an international forum for collaboration and exchange, and leverages the knowledge of leading experts for the benefit of society.

http://www.globalquakemodel.org/

GEM Newsletter - June 2013

GEM Newsletter - July 2013

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Europe strikes deal to push cost of bank failure on investors

By John O'Donnell and Robin Emmott

June 26,2013 Reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union agreed on Thursday to force investors and wealthy savers to share the costs of future bank failures, moving closer to drawing a line under years of taxpayer-funded bailouts that have prompted public outrage.

 

After seven hours of late-night talks, finance ministers from the bloc's 27 countries emerged with a blueprint to close or salvage banks in trouble. The plan stipulates that shareholders, bondholders and depositors with more than 100,000 euros ($132,000) should share the burden of saving a bank.

...

FULL ARTICLE HERE

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Big Oil Gets a Much Needed Reality Check

      

ecowatch.com - May 16, 2013

Launching today in Canada, Europe and the U.S., TarSandsRealityCheck.com presents up to date, accurate facts about Alberta’s tar sands to counter the high-level pro-oil sands lobbying ongoing in Canada, the U.S. and Europe around the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and Europe on the Fuel Quality Directive.

The digital campaign launches the same day Canadian Prime Minister Harper is expected in New York to address the Council of Foreign Relations and promote the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline. It also comes just days after the Canadian government launched a new website as part of its massive pro-tar sands PR campaign.

For the first time, world renowned economists, scientists and academics, including Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon from the University of Waterloo and Dr. Danny Harvey from the University of Toronto, have come together to present peer-reviewed, easy to understand facts about the tar sands that counter misinformation spread by the oil industry’s glossy PR machine.

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Shifting gears to accelerate shared prosperity in Latin America and Caribbean

documents.worldbank.org - June 1st, 2012 - Louise J. Cord, Leonardo Lucchetti, Carlos Rodriguez-Castelan

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have made laudable progress in the past fifteen years in reducing poverty, building the middle class and promoting prosperity for all levels of society. Extreme poverty, defined in this region as life on less than $2.50 a day, has declined by half, while in 2011, for the first time in recorded history, the LAC region had a larger number of people in the middle class than in poverty. Across this region of close to 600 million people, the poor have been gaining faster than the already well off.

(VIEW PDF REPORT)

(VIEW WEBSITE AND COMPLETE ABSTRACT)

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Farmed Fish Production Overtakes Beef

Chart showing that farmed fish production is overtaking beed production

Image: Chart showing that farmed fish production is overtaking beed production

earth-policy.org - June 12th, 2013 - Janet Larsen and J. Matthew Roney

The world quietly reached a milestone in the evolution of the human diet in 2011. For the first time in modern history, world farmed fish production topped beef production. The gap widened in 2012, with output from fish farming—also called aquaculture—reaching a record 66 million tons, compared with production of beef at 63 million tons.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Infographic: What Climate Change Means for Africa and Asia

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Maine passes second GMO label law in the U.S.

People work on a GMO protest sign.

Image: People work on a GMO protest sign.

treehugger.com - June 13th, 2013 - Margaret Badore

Yesterday, Maine's state senate easily passed a bill that may one day mandate the labeling of foods containing genetically modified organisms. The law passed 35-0, but before labels are required, five consecutive states must also pass labeling laws.

For Maine, that means the GMO labeling will only go into effect if New Hampshire, the only state with which it shares a border, passes a similar law.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

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Mass Population Response to Critical Infrastructure Failure

submitted by Alexander Fekete

Mass Population Response to Critical Infrastructure Failure

Experts and advisory board meeting 4-­5th June 2013, London

Critical infrastructures (CI) are
organizational and physical structures and
facilities of such vital importance to a
nation's society and economy that their
failure or degradation would result in
sustained supply shortages, significant
disruption of public safety and security, or
other dramatic consequences.

Source: Ministry of the Interior 2009: National CIP Strategy

Key Research Areas

1. Human and Natural Risks and Changes
2. Urban Resilience
3. Critical Infrastructure
4. Civil Security and Risk Governance
5. GIS & Remote Sensing

(SEE SLIDE PRESENTATION IN ATTACHMENT BELOW - 65 PAGE .PDF FILE)

http://www.f09.fh-koeln.de/fakultaet/personen/profs/alexander.fekete/index.html

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Fekete/

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