The Rusty Wire Service

World food prices are set to double by 2030 according to an Oxfam report to be released tomorrow. This is not alarmist; it might even turn out to be a conservative estimate. If one looks at figures released last week by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, one can see that the FAO food price index has jumped from 90 in 2000 to 232 in April 2011. That’s just the headline index based on a basket of five food commodities. When you drill down a bit further into their data, the FAO are pointing up a year-on-year increase of 71% in grain prices since April 2010.  And just so you know, “roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted,” according to another FAO-commissioned study released in May 2011. So, no prizes for guessing which hemisphere is the wasteful one and which is suffering greatest from shortage.... Oxfam’s prognosis of the world “entering an er...

As the afterglow of Betty and Obama’s visits wears off, commentators in the Irish established media have tried to make sense of it all. And in so doing, they showed themselves poorly equipped, lexically, morally and intellectually. In a piece of media manipulation that Malcolm Tucker would be proud of, the Irish Government used the Royal and Presidential visits as cover for some very bad news. Irish Central Bank figures reveal that more than 35,000 people are now over six months in arrears on mortgages worth more than €7bn. But by and large, the media was much more interested in Betty Windsor's green dress and Michelle Obama's hair. On the one hand, newspapers like the Irish Independent took a predictably fawning crypto-unionist stance in their apologia gombeenus . If one was to believe the Dublin commentators so beloved of the Indo and the Tan Times, most of Ireland is longing to return to some kind of Edwardian idyll where our relationship with Britain is fore...

( genuinely fake pic  - apparently)   The world awoke this morning to the news that Osama bin Laden has reportedly been killed by US forces in Pakistan and that his body, in accordance with ‘Islamic practices’, has already been buried at sea.  For those of you who really have been living in a cave for the past decade; Osama, the iconic figurehead of the Al Qaeda movement, has been on the run for years and since the organisation’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington DC in 2001, has been top of America’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. Insert conspiracy theory here It's also worth bearing in mind that we've been here before. A month prior her to own assasination in December 2007, Benazir Bhutto claimed in an Al Jazeera interview that "Omar Sheikh is the man who murdered Osama bin Laden." Given the persistent allegations of his connections with the US, UK and Pakistani intelligence agencies, the fact that Omar Sheikh has been in prison in Pakistan and...