Sunday, January 14, 2007

The nominations for the Koufax Awards are open and you have one week to vote. Named for famed left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax, the awards honor left-of-center/progressive political and social issues blogs.

You can nominate sites here for the 2006 Koufax Awards.

Categories include: Best blog, best pro-blog, blog most deserving wider recognition etc.
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I am going to do a promotion here. If you do not have a subscription to The Week Magazine you are cheating yourself (I am in no way affiliated with the magazine and they have nothing to do with this post).

For a news junkie and a political junkie its a miracle publication. I have been reading it since its launch and I can say without doubt it is an indispensable news source.

Essentially it culls the best news stories, columns, opinions and reviews from the world's media and condenses them into a weekly magazine. Every viewpoint from left to right is represented.

I am a voracious reader and a sponge for news but even I can't read the 100 or so magazines and newspapers per week that I would like to. "The Week" brings me as close to that goal as I can get.
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Bad news in today's New York Times. This story details a plan by the Brazilian government to auction off large tracts of the inner rainforestto loggers.

The government claims a "monitoring program" will bring order to the often anarchic behavior of logging companies.

"The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering. In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle."

The big issue here is that no matter how much we reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the world there will always be (at least in the forseeable future)some emmissions. Without the forests to turn that Co2 into Oxygen the climate will continue to warm.

Once again it's one step forward, two steps back.