The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide variety of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.

Weekend edition.

  • “David Cameron’s hopes of promoting an export-led recovery were left deflated yesterday by official figures showing that the UK’s trade deficit increased by more than expected in February.”
  • “She was supposed to be a star of the French elections, but as the campaign enters its final countdown to the first-round vote on April 22, Angela Merkel has been noticeably absent from the political maneuvers west of the Rhine.”
  • “GlobalPost’s year-long effort to answer an elusive, multi-billion dollar question: ‘Two years after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, where did the aid money go?’”
  • “A British lawyer says he is taking legal action in the United States on behalf of three alleged victims of phone hacking by the News of the World. Mark Lewis said the three were a “well-known sports person”, a sports person not in the public eye and a US citizen.”
  • “An American court’s decision to allow its intelligence agencies to withhold evidence about Britain’s involvement in “extraordinary rendition” promotes impunity for any UK officials complicit in such operations, a senior United Nations representative said last night.”
  • “The parliament in Egypt has passed a law banning senior officials who served under ex-President Hosni Mubarak from running in May’s presidential election. It means the former Vice-President Omar Suleiman would not be able to continue as a presidential candidate.”
  • “Amid the sabre-rattling and bluster over Iran, a furious if little-noticed debate is boiling over the legal basis for a US or Israeli attack on Tehran’s nuclear programme.”
  • “The Peruvian government says it will not negotiate with Shining Path rebels, who kidnapped a group of gas workers in the south of the country on Monday.”
  • “A major new study has quashed fears that onshore windfarms are causing long-term damage to bird populations, but found new evidence that some species are harmed when windfarms are built.”
  • “The belief that women and children are first to be saved when ships sink is largely a myth, a new study suggests. Analysis of survivors from 18 maritime disasters shows women “have a distinct survival disadvantage”, say researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden. The report says captains and crew have a significantly higher survival rate.”

TRNN:

Robert Greenwald was on The Young Turks for a three-part interview on his new film Koch Brothers Exposed. Here are Parts 1 (Social Security), 2 (Education) and 3 (Health Risks). I would have linked to the videos at CurrentTV but the site has only excerpts from the segments.

RoyalOak suggested a weekly book recommendation. Let’s limit it to non-fiction maybe one for a general audience and one for a more advanced audience in the same subject. Nah, have to have a reading list. One or two books would take years to go through. We’ll wing it for a while. You recommend and I’ll make a list. Now you can say you know for sure, cross yer heart, that you’re on a list. Hmmm, a mystery or sci-fi book club diary might be nice on the weekends.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. Easy to read and easily understood. An excellent companion to Naomi Klein’s No Logo and The Shock Doctrine.

The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.