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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC tells children at “what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!”

If you follow the reasoning of the United Nation’s World Food Program, then Kenya is a unique region when it comes to hunger catastrophes. In this east African country, a popular vacation destination with 32 million inhabitants, UN workers hand out more food on an annual basis than they do in southern Sudan, which civil wars have ravaged for decades. But is Kenya really dying of hunger?

If that were the case, Africa’s prospects of ever being able to feed itself would look really dismal. Take a look at a map and you’ll see that Kenya lies on Lake Victoria. The lake got its name from its British “discoverer,” John Hanning Speke, who named it after the British queen at the time. It’s really much more like an ocean than a lake, despite a constantly sinking water level. This inland sea connects Tanzania and Uganda with Kenya. Covering an area of 68,000 square kilometers (26,250 square miles), it’s Africa’s largest lake. And it is full of freshwater.

For Kenya, the question — which also applies, incidentally, to Malawi, about which there are regular reports about hunger emergencies — is really this: Can you starve if you live right next to such a gigantic freshwater reservoir?

Sure, Kenya is large. It has savannahs, highlands, arid lands in the north, mountains and sultry regions, such as the 480-kilometer (300-mile) east coast on the Indian Ocean or the Kakamega rainforest in the west, which is a virtual greenhouse. If you got things only halfway right in such a country, it seems that nobody should go hungry — and especially if it is getting assistance from the philanthropists of the world community.

Whatever surplus is produced in the western part of this blessed country only needs to be to be delivered to the north and sold. That would give the farmers more incentive to produce more. And producing more means earning more, which in turn also means that more tax money would pour into the government’s coffers and could be used to make improvements to the country’s disastrous infrastructure.

What is going on in Africa ?

Of course, Kenya would be far from thrilled to take the money it brings in and put it into improvements in the road network. It was just recently that Kenya’s minister of finance, Amos Kimunya, announced that it was urgent for him to reduce infrastructure spending because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to pay the government cabinet. Kenya currently has 94 ministers and assistant ministers, each of whom earns more than $20,000 (€12,940) a month on top of having their own state-funded compound. As a result, Kenya’s budget now has a huge deficit of nearly $300 million, and it will soon have to announce to the international community that the world’s rich countries need to foot the bill. If they don’t, the Kenyans will starve and the peace that was so painfully won — primarily by creating this enormous cabinet — will be in imperiled.

The roads are in horrid disrepair, and they’ll stay that way for a while. As a result, it would take days or even weeks to get the corn from the west to the northern parts of the country. But why would they need it there anyway? There’s a shortage in the north because the World Food Program is usually there to hand out food for free. The UN’s employees are paid to fight hunger, and that’s why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food.

These developmental aid workers, whose reports largely shape our image of Africa, behave this way to a certain extent out of an instinct for self-preservation that they believe the Africans don’t have. Without help, they say, all the Africans will starve. And, indeed, without aid, all the helpers would also be out of a job.

And what happens when the help comes? First the merchants complain because the cost of food drops through the floor. Nor is it worth it, under the status quo, to build up any surplus stocks. Then, the farmers complain because their crops become worthless. The people who cozy up with the aid workers are the ones following better advice. You can get everything for free there and you don’t even have to lift a finger.

Developing Food and Trade Isn’t Worth It

The aid workers are drawn to the arid lands, where the poor live and the help is urgently needed. Under normal circumstances, such areas don’t contain many starving people because they are thinly populated. In the Sahara, for example, hunger emergencies are comparatively insignificant. But in northern Kenya, and particularly in the region’s bordering desert land, such as the Sahel, they happen all the time.

And that’s why the aid workers dig wells there to provide the inhabitants with clean drinking water. Soon enough, there’s a downright crush around the well. Then, more and more cattle drivers and more and more nomadic shepherds bring their wards to the well. And these herds — and especially the goats — eat everything up. And, there, where you used to have someone coming by only rarely, a dusty little village shoots up, and then a little city. And, now, more and more aid workers are necessary to feed all the people who settle around the well and the feeding stations. Pretty soon, nothing can happen without aid. The area becomes hopelessly over-populated, and there is no way out of the dilemma in sight.

A Planned Economy — without a Plan

Development aid is a planned economy, even if it doesn’t have a plan. The belief that food shortages can be overcome in a planned economy is one that has already proved disastrously wrong in the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. One has to feel sorry for the Africans for their continued role as human guinea pigs.

Oscar Wilde once quipped that “Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.” It looks like he has been once again proven correct.

But one could now argue that the Africans have themselves to blame. They didn’t have to accept the aid. But that’s an insidious argument. The majority of African countries are bitterly poor. For example, even Mexico’s GDP is up to 50 times larger than that of oil-rich Sudan. And, of course, hardly any African is going to turn down any of the so generously offered donations. In the end, they put the money towards building football stadiums or beautiful boulevards that the military can parade down to celebrate the anniversaries of their seizure of power . And you can use it for limousines and to take trips to UN conferences, where you can mull over the world’s hunger problems with other heads of state.

The main reason that there is starvation in Africa is that there are no profits to be made in cultivating or trading foodstuffs. Either developmental aid ruins the profits or corrupt leaders rob their people blind. There’s hardly a country in Africa where private ownership rights are enforced; everything belongs to either the clan or the state.

And in the places in Africa where commercial agriculture has functioned — such as in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia — the spread of white settlers has ruined it. Ironically enough, the land reforms in Namibia, a former German colony, were even financed with the money of Germany’s taxpayers. And it won’t be long before these countries are also on life support paid for by the rest of the world.

Dirty Politicians Cause Hunger

It’s a fairy tale that hunger is simply just part of life in Africa. The lion’s share of Africa is sparsely populated, and many countries enjoy a climate in which anything can thrive. There was even a long period when people believed that the biggest hunger problems would surface at some point in the densely populated Asian countries, such as China and India. In the meantime, however, those countries are now even producing surpluses. And the same holds true in the very densely populated countries of Europe, where there are often massive surpluses despite the fact that only around 3 percent of the population is involved in agriculture.

Where there is hunger, it results from unethical leaders who steal from their people and let them either starve or rush them into wars. Ethiopia’s former socialist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam did this, as did Robert Mugabe, his counterpart in Zimbabwe, whose protection Mariam would go on to enjoy while in exile. And this is also the case these days in Sudan, Chad or among the neolithic communists in Eritrea. But the rest of the continent would benefit much more if people would put a little faith in Africa’s power to heal itself instead of constantly bumping up the dose of harmful medicine.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives. Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.

The scientists would not disclose where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.

Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals’ locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week’s time period.

The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed.

Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn’t know the individual phone numbers because they were disguised into “ugly” 26-digit-and-letter codes.

That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking, however, is legal and even marketed as a special feature by some U.S. cell phone providers.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, opens up the field of human-tracking for science and calls attention to what experts said is an emerging issue of locational privacy.

“This is a new step for science,” said study co-author Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, director of Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research. “For the first time we have a chance to really objectively follow certain aspects of human behavior.”

Barabasi said he spent nearly half his time on the study worrying about privacy issues. Researchers didn’t know which phone numbers were involved. They were not able to say precisely where people were, just which nearby cell phone tower was relaying the calls, which could be a matter of blocks or miles. They started with 6 million phone numbers and chose the 100,000 at random to provide “an extra layer” of anonymity for the research subjects, he said.

Barabasi said he did not check with any ethics panel. Had he done so, he might have gotten an earful, suggested bioethicist Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania.

“There is plenty going on here that sets off ethical alarm bells about privacy and trustworthiness,” Caplan said.

Studies done on normal behavior at public places is “fair game for researchers” as long as no one can figure out identities, Caplan said in an e-mail.

“So if I fight at a soccer match or walk through 30th Street train station in Philly, I can be studied,” Caplan wrote. “But my cell phone is not public. My cell phone is personal. Tracking it and thus its owner is an active intrusion into personal privacy.”

Paul Stephens, policy director at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, said the nonconsensual part of the study raises the Big Brother issue.

“It certainly is a major concern for people who basically don’t like to be tracked and shouldn’t be tracked without their knowledge,” Stephens said.

Study co-author Hidalgo said there is a difference between being a statistic — such as how many people buy a certain brand of computer — and a specific example. The people tracked in the study are more statistics than examples.

“In the wrong hands the data could be misused,” Hidalgo said. “But in scientists’ hands you’re trying to look at broad patterns…. We’re not trying to do evil things. We’re trying to make the world a little better.”

Knowing people’s travel patterns can help design better transportation systems and give doctors guidance in fighting the spread of contagious diseases, he said.

The results also tell us something new about ourselves, including that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly, he said.

“Despite the fact that we think of ourselves as spontaneous and unpredictable … we do have our patterns we move along and for the vast majority of people it’s a short distance,” Barabasi said.

The study found that nearly half of the people in the study pretty much keep to a circle little more than six miles wide and that 83 percent of the people tracked mostly stay within a 37-mile wide circle.

But then there are the people who are the travel equivalent of the super-rich, said Hidalgo, who travels more than 150 miles every weekend to visit his girlfriend. Nearly 3 percent of the population regularly go beyond a 200-mile wide circle. Less than 1 percent of people travel often out of a 621-mile circle.

Talks are underway in the UK now to set up a manufacturing consortium, New Zealand’s daily carbon market news service, Carbon News, reveals this morning.

Carbon News says entrepreneur and engineer Ian Macrae, the man who has funded Waikato University’s NZ Eco Ultra-Commuter electric vehicle project, is meeting a UK car maker with a view to establishing a UK/Australia/New Zealand consortium.

The consortium would produce an electric car and electric car technology in New Zealand, says Mike Duke, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the university.

“It’s looking promising,” says Duke, who stresses that the idea is being developed outside government.

Duke says that government support would be helpful as the project has had no government funding to date.

“The only person who’s putting his money where his mouth is, is Ian.”

“That’s going to dictate policy. If they could get behind Ian then we could accelerate the process for producing electric cars.”

Duke also points to research being undertaken by his university colleagues that would benefit New Zealand’s electric vehicle ambitions.

“There’s a lot of good work going on here that could complement electric car development so that New Zealand is dealing with it from a production as well as a use point of view.”

Macrae is also a member of the Ministry of Transport-funded Vehicle Energy and Renewables Group (VERG), the advisory group set up to help New Zealand achieve its electric vehicles targets as laid out in last year’s New Zealand Energy Strategy.

So far, hacks from the mainstream Swedish press seem to be on holiday, so news about the proposed law is woefully hard to come by. That leaves us turning to this summary from the decidedly partisan Swedish Pirate Party for details. We’d prefer to rely on a more neutral group, but that wasn’t possible this time. According to them, here’s a broad outline:

The En anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet bill (which loosely translates to “a better adapted military intelligence gathering”) gives Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) direct access to the traffic passing through its borders. Now remember, we’re talking about the internet, which frequently routes packets though multiple geographically dispersed hops before they reach their final destination.

This all but guarantees that emails and voice over IP (VoIP) calls between Swedes will routinely be siphoned into a massive monitoring machine. And we wouldn’t be surprised if traffic between parties with no tie to the country regularly passes through Sweden’s border as well, and that too would be fair game. (For example, email sent from a BT address in London to Finland is likely to pass through Sweden first.)

Once intercepted, the data will be searched for certain keywords, and those that contain the words will be pulled aside for additional scrutiny. A broad array of organizations will have use of the system, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the police, secret service and customs, and in some cases major businesses. The bill allows Swedes to be singled out, as well.

When the bill was introduced in early 2007, Google was reportedly so concerned about its consequences for privacy that it threatened to limit its ties to the country if the measure passed.

“We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden’s borders if the proposal goes through,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said last year, according to this article. “We simply cannot compromise our users’ integrity by allowing Swedish authorities access to data that may not even concern Swedish activity.”

But so far, few outside of the pro-privacy universe have bothered to discuss the bill this time around. There have been no similar pronouncements from Google and representatives there didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has likewise been reticent about the bill.

“Surprisingly enough, there hasn’t been that much written about it, even in the Swedish media,” said Patrik Runald, a Swedish national and a security response manager for F-Secure who works in San Jose, California.

“The funny thing is when asked what do you want to look for, [backers of the bill] don’t really specify what they’re interested in,” he continued. “It’s a very broad bill. They basically can interpret whatever they like.”

One of the few recent press mentions of the bill came from a publication called Cellular News in London. According to this story, Nordic and Baltic telecommunications provider TeliaSonera planned to move email servers out of Sweden to protect the privacy of its Finnish customers.

By owning land and other parts of the agricultural business, these new investors are freed from rules aimed at curbing the number of speculative bets that they and other financial investors can make in commodity markets. “I just wonder if they need some sheep’s clothing to put on,” Mr. Hainline said.

Mark Lapolla, an adviser to institutional investors, is also a bit wary of the potential disruption this new money could cause. “It is important to ask whether these financial investors want to actually operate the means of production — or simply want to have a direct link into the physical supply of commodities and thereby reduce the risk of their speculation,” he said.

Grain elevators, especially, could give these investors new ways to make money, because they can buy or sell the actual bushels of corn or soybeans, rather than buying and selling financial derivatives that are linked to those commodities.

When crop prices are climbing, holding inventory for future sale can yield higher profits than selling to meet current demand, for example. Or if prices diverge in different parts of the world, inventory can be shipped to the more profitable market.

“It’s a huge disadvantage to not be able to trade the physical commodity,” said Andrew J. Redleaf, founder of Whitebox Advisors, a hedge fund management firm in Minneapolis.

Mr. Redleaf bought several large grain elevator complexes from ConAgra and Cargill last year for a long-term stake in what he sees as a high-growth business. The elevators can store 36 million bushels of grain.

“We discovered that our lease customers, major food company types, are really happy to see us, because they are apt to see Cargill and ConAgra as competitors,” he said.

The executives making such bets say that fears about their new role are unfounded, and that their investments will be a plus for farming and, ultimately, for consumers.

“The world is asking for more food, more energy. You see a huge demand,” said Axel Hinsch, chief executive of Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, which is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil with the backing of big institutional investors, including AIG Investments.

“What this new investment will buy is more technology,” Mr. Hinsch said. “We will be helping to accelerate the development of infrastructure, and the consumer will benefit because there will be more supply.”

Financial investors also can provide grain elevator operators the money they need to weather today’s more volatile commodity markets. When wild swings in prices become common, as they are now, elevator operators have to put up more cash to lock in future prices. John Duryea, co-portfolio manager of the Ospraie Special Opportunity Fund, is buying 66 grain elevators with a total capacity of 110 million bushels from ConAgra for $2.1 billion. The deal, expected to close by the end of June, also will give Ospraie a stake in 57 fertilizer distribution centers and the barges and ships necessary to keep them supplied with low-cost imports.

Starting on Saturday, officers will check drivers’ identification and ask whether they have a “legitimate purpose” to be in the Trinidad area, such as going to a doctor or church or visiting friends or relatives. If not, the drivers will be turned away.

The Neighborhood Safety Zone initiative is the latest crime-fighting attempt by Lanier and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who have been under pressure from residents to stop a recent surge in violence. Last weekend was especially bloody, with seven slayings, including three in the Trinidad area.

“In certain areas, we need to go beyond the normal methods of policing,” Fenty (D) said at a news conference announcing the action. “We’re going to go into an area and completely shut it down to prevent shootings and the sale of drugs.”

The checkpoint will stop vehicles approaching the 1400 block of Montello Avenue NE, a section of the Trinidad neighborhood that has been plagued with homicides and other violence. Police will search cars if they suspect the presence of guns or drugs, and will arrest people who do not cooperate, under a charge of failure to obey a police officer, officials said.

The announcement by the government agency, the Crown Estate, which owns the seabed surrounding the country was welcomed by British Wind Energy Association chairman Adam Bruce as “impressively bold.”

Under rounds one and two of offshore renewable power generation leasing programme a total of eight gigawatts of wind turbines are under development.

Round three announced on Wednesday would raise that to 33 gigawatts, equivalent to one quarter of the country’s electricity supply.

“The expansion of wind energy is already a real success story for the UK. We will shortly become the leading country in the world in terms of the number of wind farms operating offshore. The potential for round three will add to that success,” said Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks.

The BWEA said that if round three met its goal it would mean some 5,000 more wind turbines being built in the 11 sites around the coastline identified by the Crown Estate.

Rob Hastings, head of the Crown Estate’s marine section, said he anticipated investment of 60 to 80 billion pounds would be necessary to achieve the round three goal.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Stockton, about 85 miles east of San Francisco, where roughly three of every four homes for sale are in or on the path to foreclosure.

The city’s resale market is “pretty much gone,” said Cameron Pannabecker, owner of Cal-Pro Mortgage Inc.

“I don’t know an agent today who would take your listing unless you’re a hard-luck case. There is just too much competition,” Pannabecker said. Properties that at the peak of the market two years ago were selling at $500,000, or appraised at $500,000, are now selling for $200,000, he said.

And because foreclosures dot all areas of Stockton, buyers have their pick of properties, said John Knight, a professor of finance and real estate at Stockton’s University of the Pacific Eberhardt School of Business. “Honestly, there isn’t a huge amount of difference between a foreclosed home and a regular home than the prices,” Knight said.

Worse for people trying to sell their homes, lenders in possession of houses and condominiums may keep their fire-sale in full swing for months to come to attract investors to a market near the top of U.S. surveys of areas hit by foreclosures.

“It’s a tough market to be a normal seller,” said Stockton real estate agent Michael Blower of Blower Realtors. “I’ll really ask them, ‘Do you need to sell?’ Because your competition are banks who want to clean it off their books.”