Monday 10-11-10

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Soaring prices threaten new food crisis

"I think we have a food crisis right now," said Hussein Allidina, head of
commodities research at Morgan Stanley.

In Chicago, the prices of agricultural commodities jumped so sharply that
they hit limits imposed on daily movement by the city's futures exchange,
the biggest in the world.

The US is the world's largest corn grower and its exports make up the
majority of global trade in the grain. The USDA had earlier forecast a
record corn crop this year but a combination of unfavourable heat and heavy rains forced a re-evaluation of
yields.

The fall in supplies has prompted countries such as Russia and Ukraine to
impose export restrictions on grains.

Big importers in the Middle East and North Africa have started to hoard
supplies, which has further tightened the market.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/12b06cee-d300-11df-9ae9-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F12b06cee-d300-11df-9ae9-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fhome%2Fus

This is just a shame, but not a suprise
U.S. unprepared to care for kids in major disaster
The nation is woefully unprepared to care for children in a disaster, says an analysis delivered Wednesday to the White House and Congress.
The National Commission on Children and Disasters found that even under normal circumstances, most ambulances and emergency rooms are not prepared to care for severely injured children.

"If you think of a disaster, there may be hundreds of thousands of kids who need medical care, and you'll be putting them in an environment where they don't have the experience or equipment to care for kids," says commission member Michael Anderson of Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland.

The bipartisan commission was established three years ago by President Bush to identify gaps in disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

Craig Fugate, President Obama's chief of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, says he began meeting with commission members in his first week on the job because he realized from his days as a paramedic that "children are not small adults. You can't scale stuff down and meet the needs of infants and children."

The report:

•Calls on the White House to develop a national strategy on children and disasters.

•Calls for bolstering the pediatric capabilities of the National Disaster Medical System, medical teams that respond to disasters.

•Calls for funding to improve disaster planning for schools, child care, juvenile justice and child welfare agencies.

•Urges federal agencies to buy "child-appropriate" supplies for ambulances and hospitals.

•Recommends creating a national evacuee tracking system to reunite children with families.

One positive step was Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' commitment to bolster the strategic national stockpile of medicines used in emergencies with supplies for children, Anderson says.

Still, he worries that now that the commission's work is done, the debate will fade away.

"I'm not going to let that happen," he says. "Whether I'm a commissioner or Mike the Pediatrician."

http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/pediatrics/2010-10-07-1Akidcrisis07_ST_N.htm

Archaeologists Find Mini-Pompeii Buried in Norway
The ancient Roman city, which was covered in ash after the sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, now has competition from a buried town that has been unearthed in Norway.

Archaeologists discovered the mini-Pompeii while digging in the headland formed by the Topdalselva River and the North Sea near southern Norway.

Under three feet of sand, they found a settlement that has been undisturbed for 5,500 years.

"This is an archaeological sensation," said Håkon Glørstad, a spokesman for the dig, according to the Norwegian website News in English.

So far, they've determined that the settlement contains stone structures, and found pottery and arrowheads preserved by the sand.

"We expected to find an 'ordinary' Scandinavian Stone Age site, badly preserved and small. Instead, we discovered a unique site, buried under a thick sand layer," lead archaeologist Lars Sundström, of the University of Oslo, told Discovery News.

Signs indicate that the settlement wasn't simply deserted over time. Instead, a sudden event caused it to be encased in sand, leaving it hidden for centuries.

"Most probably the site was suddenly flooded, and covered with sand by the nearby river," Sundström said.

The Norwegian settlement was likely built by people of the Funnel Beaker Culture -- a late Neolithic culture that thrived in northern Europe and Scandinavia between 4,000 B.C. and 2,400 B.C., according to Digital Journal.

So far, the archaeologists have excavated more than 300 square yards, though it appears the settlement extends much further.

The eruption of Vesuvius froze the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum for more than a thousand years. Buried in ash, they were nothing more than a vague legend until the 18th century, when an Italian peasant stumbled upon Herculaneum while digging a well.
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/archaeologists-find-mini-pompeii-buried-in-norway/19667676?test=latestnews

An interesting insight
What once was valued
During the assault weapons ban, I was much more inclined to clean and maintain my AR mags. If one malfunctioned, I would try to determine the problem. And would even bend the feedlips some with a pair of pliers and that usually worked. Or any other various fixes, like replacing follower and springs. But that was back when they were expensive and not necessarily reliable when you found one, since they were all used and probably beat up. Now that you can get good magazines for $10 each, I’m more inclined to toss a finicky magazine in the bottom of the ammo vault and forget about it.

Magazines are disposable again.
http://www.saysuncle.com/