The following statement was issued today by Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) President and CEO Jim Greenwood following President-elect Barack Obama's nomination of former Senator Tom Daschle for Secretary of the U.S.
Obama is staffing his administration with bloggers.
- New Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Daschle's last post to "Travels With Tom" -- a "travel web log" -- is from August 2003. It features a long quote from Monty Python's Holy Grail movie. The post before that one reads: "I seem to be lost in a vast farm in southeast South Dakota. Send a rescue party!"
- Obama's choice to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, keeps a more up-to-date blog. Unbloggily, he keeps comments off. So we're not sure we agree with Matthew Yglesias when he calls Orszag "highest-ranking blogger in the history of the United States of America."
- The pair Obama chose to lead his FCC transition team, Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach, seem more native to the form. Crawford recently posted a link to Alaska Senator Ted Steven's infamous "series of tubes" speech. Following an equally popular meme, Werbach -- who embedded a Twitter stream on his blog -- wrote a short post on November 5 titled "Yes. we. did."
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Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for the position of Homeland Security secretary, NPR has confirmed. Two officials familiar with Obama's thinking told NPR that the president-elect plans to ask Napolitano to take the post.
(AP) - Human rights investigators from the Iraqi Ministry of Justice inspect the site where the remains of at least eight people have been unearthed in a mass grave in a mainly Shiite area on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008. The military says Iraqi soldiers acting on a tip found the remains Monday in an unmarked grave in the Ur neighborhood in a northeastern section of the capital. It's the second mass grave announced this week. Graffiti offers the building for sale. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
By Erik Hoffner
News of the latest negotiations on how many bluefin tuna the world can afford to kill without extinctionating the species (yes, it's a word ... to me) is yet to be inked, and that's fine, because it's always such a depressing story. Who us, kill too many of a disappearing fish? But it reminded me of the new book by Richard Ellis, Tuna: A Love Story, which is great in many respects in part because in it he declares that we need to save this species precisely because it's a phenomenal animal. Warm blooded, acrobatic, long-lived, and wily, it's a miracle of evolution.
Yet every year more of these creatures are netted while small, kept captive in oceanic pens (so called "ranches") in places like South Australia, and fattened until they're just right for the sushi market. While this perhaps takes some pressure off still-wild tuna, the world's appetite for bluefin is so great that I think it only adds more fuel to the fire. Which is one reason why the recent breakthrough by an Australian for-profit, Clean Seas, who has coerced captive bluefin to breed in the lab, therefore opening the door to an endless supply of new ranch recruits, is more disturbing to me than hopeful. The company's creepy statement about it doesn't help:
"We have proven what can be done, even with southern bluefin tuna, which is the holy grail (of aquaculture)," Mr Stehr said.
"In the future this will be a staggering industry of immense proportions. It depends on us, the state government, the federal Government, how big we want this to be.
"In years to come this will give us a sustainable bluefin industry, that no one in the world will be able to attack."
Wow. Today, bluefin tuna, tomorrow, the world! And what does that last bit mean, exactly, that no one will be able to assault their fish farms?
The company's name is magnificently ironic, and -- this is the main reason I'm driving at -- this is not a "holy grail" for at least the global commons. What are they going to feed these legions of domesticated tuna with, for years and years until they're "ripe"? Mindblowing amounts of small- to medium-sized fish, all caught at sea for the express purpose of fattening bluefins, one of the world's largest predators. Hence the irony: Clean Seas, cleansing the oceans of the very forage fish capable of sustaining any wild bluefins (and myriad other critters) that remain beyond pen, net, and rope.
Hoovering up the foodchain for fresh sushi makes very little sense except profit-motive-wise. But even folks like Richard Ellis miss this important point when he fails to look down the feed-line and instead hails this development in his book as something that has perhaps arrived "in time to rescue the Mediterranean bluefins from the rapacious overfishing by the Europeans."
Not in my book.
Filed under: Britney Spears
The people at Britney's record label are treating her new album like the frickin' Shroud of Turin -- putting legitimate music critics through a virtual gauntlet just to get a peek.Even though the album has already leaked online, we're told the rules...
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The central bank indicates interest rates will be cut again soon. The news, along with other economic concerns, sends Wall Street into another panic.
Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington Ronald D. White -- Although consumers got some welcome news Wednesday about the prices they pay, the clouds over the economy loomed larger than ever.