2. Once again, the world failed to end. Some are disappointed but most are actually happy about it.

3. The news media continues to use false statistics to mask the true decline of the world’s economy and manages to actually get the stock market (a false indicator if there ever was one) to creep above 10K even though unemployment is up, foreclosures are up, the cost of living is up, and wages are down.

4. The use of violence and warfare worldwide climbed drastically as world societies began to feel the reins of control over increasingly poor and desperate populations

5. More than half of the world’s population at some point suffered from hunger, inadequate shelter, a lack of clean water, or systemic violence in 2009.

Now….it should be easy to improve on that record. Let’s hope we have a better 2010.

The Ethiopian government is expected to confirm later that it needs emergency food aid for 6.2 million people.

This is because of the effects of prolonged drought and erratic rains on crops and grazing for livestock.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) is already facing a shortfall of more than $85m (£50m) worth of food for Ethiopia to the end of this year.

Aid agency Oxfam has called for a new approach to tackling the risk of disaster in the country.

In a report marking 25 years since the famine that killed around one million Ethiopians, Oxfam said that imported food aid saves lives in the short term but does little to help communities withstand the next shock.

MARK MacKINNON

HYANGSAN, NORTH KOREA — From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Last updated on Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009 05:34PM EDT

In a country where citizens are subjected to ceaseless propaganda telling them that they live in a socialist paradise, it’s the silence that tells the other side of the story.

You can stand in the middle of some Pyongyang streets, even at rush hour, and hear only the occasional sound of an automobile engine because private cars are so rare. The quiet lingers, too, in the so-called industrial towns, their skylines dominated by smokestacks that never seem to be in use.

The silence is the sound of an economy in collapse, and nowhere is it more noticeable than in the countryside beyond the showcase capital city. Here, farmers tend their crops with hoes, shovels and their bare hands while the occasional piece of rusting farm equipment – rendered useless by a fuel shortage – sits idle amid the vast fields of rice and corn.

Despite having more arable land per capita than the United Kingdom or Belgium, North Korea is chronically, desperately short of food, and spiralling downward into its worst crisis in a decade.

The United Nations says some 8.7 million North Koreans – more than one third of the population of 23 million – are in need of food aid, marking the country’s worst food crisis since a famine in the late 1990s that by some estimates claimed the lives of three million people.

Almost three-quarters of North Korean households have reduced their food intake, and malnutrition among children under the age of 5 has risen dramatically, a result of diarrhea caused by eating food scrounged from the wild.

Like the last famine, today’s crisis is very much man-made, and one that other countries have been reluctant to help resolve for political reasons. Despite an appeal last year from the World Food Program, only $75-million (U.S.) of the needed $500-million has been received to date, and the organization expects to reach only about a quarter of those in need this year.

“We’ve been so underfunded that we’ve had to cut right back on our operations there, and indeed cut back on our staff in the country,” said WFP spokeswoman Caroline Hurford. She added that despite strict monitoring to ensure the aid gets to those who need it, it’s harder to get donor countries to support operations in North Korea than other countries in crisis.

“We hope [the funding shortfall] isn’t related to the nuclear test,” Ms. Hurford said. “We trust that the international community is focused on the real needs of a very vulnerable population. … When people are resorting to eating wild foods, it means they aren’t able to access or afford what limited food is available. They’re in desperate straits, so they’re filling their bellies as best they can.”

The crisis has been exacerbated by Pyongyang’s refusal since March to accept food aid provided by the United States, which previously had been the biggest donor to the WFP effort. Aid from South Korea – which included food and fertilizer and accounted for 5 per cent of the North’s gross domestic product – has also been suspended since last year’s election of President Lee Myung-bak, who unlike his predecessors tied such help to North Korea taking steps to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

When the WFP launched its humanitarian appeal last year, it was to have been the largest such program in the world in terms of the number of people it helped. Now aid will get only to the most vulnerable groups: children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly. Since January, the program has been scaled down to just over 10 per cent of the target capacity, with the WFP slashing staff and closing three of its six offices around the country. Meanwhile, the WFP estimates that North Korea will see a shortfall of 83,000 tonnes of rice following the November harvest.

While the Pyongyang regime regularly tells its citizens that the United States – bent on breaking the world’s last truly Communist state – is to blame for the economic woes, the WFP says it has received no aid since Kim Jong-il’s regime carried out a widely condemned nuclear test, as well as a series of provocative rocket launches, earlier this year.

Building up the military at all costs is the cornerstone of Mr. Kim’s songun ideology, which emphasizes the threat posed by U.S. forces in South Korea. North Koreans, many of them deeply indoctrinated, profess to agree with that philosophy, though some are openly anxious for the country to begin developing sectors other than the armed forces.

“Now our military is strong. We are afraid of no one,” said a tour guide at one state-run museum. “But our lives are poor, as you can see, so maybe now that our military is strong, we can build up the economy.”

Analysts believe North Korea could feed itself under normal circumstances, particularly since, according to the World Bank, North Korea has just under 125 hectares of arable land per 1,000 people, compared with 95 hectares in the U.K. and 80 in Belgium and China. (The Canadian figure is 1,443 hectares per 1,000 people, a ratio surpassed only by Australia and Kazakhstan.) North Korea’s farmers, however, are crippled by the country’s isolation and the government’s top-down management of agriculture. They have faced a particularly difficult struggle since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which meant the end of decades of nearly free fuel from Pyongyang’s former patron.

“There are no farm animals, virtually no machinery. They’re not practising anything like crop rotation,” said Paul French, author of North Korea: The Paranoid Peninsula. “You know there’s a problem when people have eaten all the livestock.”

A fertilizer shortage has also taken a toll on crop yields, and has become even more acute since South Korea stopped sending annual aid of 300,000 tonnes a year, citing concerns that the chemicals were being redirected for military purposes. North Korea’s own fertilizer output is estimated at less than 500,000 tonnes a year, about a third of the 1.5 million tonnes the country needs for use on its grain farms, according to the Unification Ministry in Seoul.

Some observers say the root of the problem is Pyongyang’s stubborn insistence on the same collective-farm model that proved a catastrophic failure in China, the Soviet Union and other socialist states.

While travelling in North Korea, Mr. French said, he noticed that private plots outside some North Korean homes were “flourishing” compared with the large collective farms. “If you give people their own land, they take care of it and make use of it as much as possible,” he said.

Digg/Reddit Both Growing Like Weeds
By Alex Wilhelm on August 28, 2009

redditOndigg

As quite the fan of news generated by social voting, mostly due to the inanity of most of the submissions that rise to the top, I keep close tabs on Digg and Reddit. Happily, both services have been growing quickly over the past year. Digg has grown to nearly 40 million monthly uniques, up 75% year over year, while Reddit now brings in more than 5 million, a healthy 105% increase over a year previous. So says Compete, so take the numbers with a grain of salt.

Of course, these two services dwarf their more niche competitors such as HackerNews or the also-rans such as Mixx. All things together, it would seem that Digg and Reddit are going to become not only important content portals but viable news sources for the coming half decade. Even if they only promoted misinformation their sheer scale places them up with the major newspapers as sources of important information.

And that of course encapsulates the darker side of gameable systems that have great reach, what happens when the legions of hackers descend upon you and break the cycle of trust. Not to sound overly trite, but with great power comes great responsibilities. Now that Digg and Reddit will soon influence 50 million peoples views, ideas, and perspectives monthly, who is watching to make sure that there is no small man behind a curtain pulling the wrong levers?

US Bill Draft Ponders Powers to Be Given to President When Declaring a “Cybersecurity Emergency”

US Bill Draft Ponders Powers to Be Given to President When Declaring a “Cybersecurity Emergency”

CNet writes:

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version (…)

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license. (…)

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to “direct the national response to the cyber threat” if necessary for “the national defense and security.” The White House is supposed to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government.

Lee Tien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is quoted saying, “There’s no provision for any administrative process or review. That’s where the problems seem to start.”

This video shows that Michael was still alive after his dead body was transported to the Los Angeles Dept. of Coroner I checked the license plate number and it looks like the King of Pop is jumping out of the same van, his dead body has been in. I got the original video tape from a trustworthy source. I know him for years. And I am sure it´s real and Michael is alive.

Some of the numbers are quite astounding. Could you build the next $100Million blog ?
Blog Name Owner Sold to Amount
Ugo Ugo Entertainment Hearst Corporation $100 Million
Fotolog Scott Heiferman Hi-Media Group $90 Million
Paidcontent Rafat Ali Guardian Media Group $30 Million
Tatter and Company Chang-Won Kim /Chester Roh Google $30 Million
Weblogs Inc Brian Alvey/Jason Calcanis AOL $25 Million
Ars Technica Ken “Caesar” Fisher Conde Nast Publications $25 Million
LiveJournal Brad Fitzpatrick/Six Apart Six Apart to SUP $20 Million
Bankaholic John Wu Bankrate.com $15 Million
Deadline Hollywood Nikki Finke Mail Media Corp. $15 Million
instapundit Glenn Reynolds AOL $12 Million
Blog Herald The Bloggy Net The Bloggy Network $12 Million
Wonkette Gawker Media Ken Layne $12 Million
celebrity babies Danielle Friedland Times Inc $10 Million
Tree Hugger Graham Hill Discovery Communication $10 Million
Freakanomics Stephen J. Dubner NY Times $8 Million
The Consumerist Gawker Media Consumer Media LLC, $7 Million
World Hum Jim Benning and Michael Yessis Travel Channel $6 Million
arseblog Andrew Managan OleOle $5 Million
gCaptain John Konrad/gCaptain Unofficial Networks $1.9Million
GardenRant Susan Harris GardenWeb $1.3 Million
CGBlog Peter Stinson Unofficial Networks $1.2 Million
Gridskipper Gawker Media Curbed $750,000
Idolator Gawker Media Buzznet $500,000
jkOnTheRun James Kendrick / Kevin Tofel Giga Omni Media $400,000
Basic Thinking Robert Basic Serverloft $66,000
GatherLittlebyLittle GatherLittlebyLittle The Financial Blogger $15,000
momscashblog Kristi JJ $10,000
Blog Oh! Blog Bob Jiwakacau Jainis Chalvecma $10,000
Blogging Fingers Matt Jones Revenuewire $6,000

Hopefully this list inspires you to work harder on your blog – it may not be exhaustive so if you know of any other large blog sales, please leave them in the comments.

Bank Machine, an ATM provider from England, will be using cockney rhyming slang on five of their ATM screens in East London for the next three months, to try to amuse customers.

“Readin’ your bladder of lard”, read the message on the screen. It asked for his “Huckleberry Finn”. Then more bewildering questions: did he wanted to see his balance on the Charlie Sheen? Did he wish to change his Huckleberry Finn or did he simply require sausage and mash, with or without a receipt?”

Roy Parker, 62, a bona fide Cockney, who works behind the counter of a mini-cab firm next to one of the cockney ATMs noticed a major flaw in the idea however.

“Real Cockneys don’t have bank accounts or all that palava,” he said. “They put it under the mattress.”

Ted Kennedy — The Last Brother – CBS News

It’s the end of an era. The last of the Kennedy brothers is now dead and gone. Since JFK Jr. died some years ago, that leaves the Kennedy women and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the sole survivors to carry the Kennedy flame. We’ll see how that goes.