STWR - Share The World's Resources

Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It's to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it's widely acknowledged not to be his birthday. Along with its religious significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26 - January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and historical heritage.

On the Indonesian island of Bali, thousands of senior government officials are negotiating a plan to slow global warming. The meeting, which will focus on how to limit the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, will run for the first two weeks of December and include 192 countries. This year’s conclave is the 13th in a series launched by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that came into force in 1994. The coal, gas and oil companies that are major producers of greenhouse gases are finally taking notice of these high-level political discussions.

“The distribution of income in Britain has now become so unequal that it is beginning to resemble a Third World country”, wrote Gordon Brown in his 1989 indictment of Thatcherism, Where There Is Greed. He complained that since 1979 “an extraordinary transfer of resources, from poor to rich, has taken place”. Indeed, so great had the level of inequality become that it was “difficult to argue that there remains even a common interest between the top 1 percent to whom Mrs Thatcher has given so much, and the rest of the nation”.

22nd Nov 07 - Naomi Klein, Los Angles Times

The world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man, Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent days, more details have come out about him. It turns out that the 40-year-old didn't just die after being shocked -- his life was marked by shock as well.

20th Nov 07 - Paul Ormerod, Adbusters magazine

At the forefront of economics, major changes are happening. And many of them are changes for the better. The old economics view of the world, in which everyone acts purely in his or her own self-interest, in which free markets are the solution to almost everything, has been abandoned.

20th Nov 07 - Mark Engler, Dissent Magazine

Joseph Stiglitz's lack of political savvy has produced both a withering critique of IMF-led corporate globalization and a failed vision for how to move beyond it.