Environment

The news about narcotic painkillers is increasingly dire: Overdoses now kill nearly 15,000 people a year -- more than heroin and cocaine combined. In some states, the painkiller death toll exceeds that of car crashes.

Pinker says the world is becoming more peaceful

Steven Pinker wants you to know that violence has declined.

Despite civil wars in Africa and the Mideast, ongoing strife in Afghanistan, and the barrage of local and national crimes reported on the nightly news, people are living in a much more peaceful era than they might think.

Fourteen African countries use a currency that hurts their economies and benefits their former colonial master, France.

Three weeks ago, a rumour emerged that the CFA franc - two closely-related currencies used by 14 countries in western and central Africa - would be devalued by 35 per cent on January 1, 2012.

Katerva, a new nonprofit set up to recognize and support stand-out sustainability efforts around the world, has just announced the winner of an award competition it hopes will be like a Nobel prize in the broad and somewhat amorphous field of sustainability: Sanergy, a company that builds low-cost toilets in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya and converts the waste into fuel and fertilizer.

For the full story in Forbes go to: 

Source: Common Cause | The venerable clean government organization, Common Cause, has an excellent, digestible report available on the politics—or the money in politics—concerning the “fracking” controversy. The report describes the problems with fracking:

This should be a really easy question for former MF Global (OTC: MFGLQ) CEO Jon Corzine. We should be able to ask, "So, Corzine, where is the money?" and he'd point us in the right direction.

But in the wake of MF Global's whirlwind bankruptcy, that question has been anything but easy.

The dream – or myth – of mobility was the glue that helped keep America together

In “The Broken Contract“, his essay in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, New Yorker staff writer George Packer argues that the source of widening US inequality is to be found when…

Organized money and the conservative movement seized the moment back in 1978 to begin a massive, generation-long transfer of wealth to the richest Americans.

By guest reviewer Alex McCallum, Moderator of www.MarketForum.com

Changing Our World: Solutions for a Future

http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Our-World-Solutions-Future/dp/0983100608/...