Libros
Mother Jones
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On Thursday, France’s parliament unanimously approved a new law prohibiting large supermarkets from throwing out unsold food, instead mandating stores donate any surplus groceries to charities or for animal feed use.
The law, which aims to reduce waste in a country where people trash up to 30 kilos of food per person annually, is part of a more general energy and environmental bill.
“There’s an absolute urgency—charities are desperate for food,” MP Yves Jégo said. “The most moving part of this law is that it opens us up to others who are suffering.”
The new regulations will also ban the common practice of intentionally destroying unsold food by bleaching it—a process meant to prevent people from searching for food in dumpsters, which has lead to lawsuits after people became sick from eating spoiled food.
Now, the local politician who sparked the law’s creation is hoping other countries will adopt similar bans on supermarket waste. Arash Derambarsh, who slammed such bleaching practices as “scandalous” to the Guardian, will take his campaign to a United Nations’ summit discussing ways to end poverty this November.
In the United States, nearly half of all food goes uneaten and sent to landfills.
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This Is the Unprecedented New Law France Just Passed to Eliminate Supermarket Waste
Mother Jones
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Here is Ronald Reagan on October 27, 1983, explaining his decision to invade Grenada in a nationally televised address:
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was seized. He and several members of his cabinet were subsequently executed, and a 24-hour shoot-to-kill curfew was put in effect.was without a government, its only authority exercised by a self-proclaimed band of military men.
There were then about 1,000 of our citizens on Grenada, 800 of them students in St. George’s University Medical School. Concerned that they’d be harmed or held as hostages, I ordered a flotilla of ships, then on its way to Lebanon with marines, part of our regular rotation program, to circle south on a course that would put them somewhere in the vicinity of Grenada in case there should be a need to evacuate our people.
Last weekend, I was awakened in the early morning hours and told that six members of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, joined by Jamaica and Barbados, had sent an urgent request that we join them in a military operation to restore order and democracy to Grenada….These small, peaceful nations needed our help. Three of them don’t have armies at all, and the others have very limited forces. The legitimacy of their request, plus my own concern for our citizens, dictated my decision.
Shorter Reagan: the government of Grenada was in chaos; Americans were in danger; and nearby governments requested our help. So we sent in troops. Does this sound at all familiar?
As it happens, there was little evidence that any Americans were in danger, and the nearby governments had asked for help largely because Reagan had requested it. The real reason for the invasion was that Grenada was a nearby country and Reagan was concerned that Cuba and the Soviet Union were establishing a military foothold there. Does it start to sound familiar now?
You may decide for yourself whether the invasion of Grenada was justified. The Cuban military presence was real, after all. And there’s certainly no question about the instability of the Grenadian government.
Then again, the eastward expansion of NATO and the more recent EU/American attempts to increase Western influence in Ukraine have been quite real too. And there’s certainly no question about the instability of the Ukrainian government. So does that mean Vladimir Putin was justified in sending troops into Crimea? Once again, you may decide for yourself. But Grenada might provide a useful framework for thinking about how regional powers react to perceived threats in their backyards.
This article:
Mother Jones
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AOL has decided to change the way it handles 401(k) retirement accounts. Instead of matching employee contributions monthly, it will make one lump-sum match at the end of the year. This screws employees and makes more money for AOL in two ways. First, they no longer contribute any matching funds at all for people who leave in the middle of the year. Second, employees don’t earn interest on their matching funds throughout the year.
So what’s behind this Scrooge-like nickel and diming? Can you guess? Can you? Here’s CEO Tim Armstrong:
In the CEO chair, let me give you an example of the decisions we have to make as a company: Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as a company….As a CEO and Management Team, we had to decide “Do we pass the $7.1 million of Obamacare costs to our employees or do we try to eat as much of that as possible and cut other benefits?”
It’s Obamacare’s fault! The all-purpose punching bag gets the blame again. AOL’s health care expenses went up this year, just as they have every year since the company was founded, but this time it’s Obamacare’s fault. Why? Well, why not? It’s a mighty handy excuse, isn’t it? And it certainly distracts everyone from the fact that AOL is shafting its employees even though it just announced its best results in a decade.
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