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Thursday, November 27, 2003 |
How the world is getting hungrier each year. ... and why we lack the political will to do somethng about it. "Across the world an estimated 842 million people are today undernourished - and that figure is again climbing, with an additional 5 million hungry people every year. The figures, says the report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 'signal a setback in the war on hunger'. The prospect of cutting by half the number of people who go hungry - the target set by the world's governments in 1996 - looks 'increasingly remote'.
The shocking thing about this is that, in the world of the politics of aid, at any rate, nobody is shocked." —Indelendent.UK [Follow Me Here...]
4:23:22 PM Permalink
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The Long Goodbye
From Today in Literature we learn that 50 years ago today, Raymond Chandler's masterpiece, The Long Goodbye
was published. 1953 was some year: Hank Williams died in January, I was
born in July, and this book was published in November; other books
published include Nabokov's Pnin, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Ian
Fleming's Goldfinger. If you haven't read Chandler, there's no better
time to pick him up and no better book to read (though other novels are
also good, as are the short stories). It's a bitter, despairing novel,
a bleak portrait of Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles he lives in, and in
a way of the author himself. Robert Altman made a great movie of it, scripted by Leigh Brackett (who also wrote screenplays of The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and The Empire Strikes Back, among others). People will be reading this novel for a long time.
11:11:53 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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