Tata Nano now available. World’s cheapest car

The Tata Nano is $2,500, and is now for sale in India. It has a 2 cylinder, 642cc engine and is 3.1 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. If there’s a traffic jam, then just drive this enclosed motorcycle on the sidewalk.

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Why Sri Lanka Burns, Part II

TamilNet photo: JVP protest draws hundreds of Buddhist monks.

The most troubling aspect of Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Tamil conflict is that it’s a secondary conflict, and there is no possibility of peace until the primary conflict is identified and understood.

The primary conflict actually has nothing to do with the Tamils– it’s internal to the Sinhalese, [...]

Lovelle Mixon, Oscar Grant, and Oakland police

On New Years Day in Oakland, Oscar Grant was killed by BART police as he lay on the ground not protesting. The officer, Johannes Mehserle, has been charged with murder. On Saturday, Lovelle Mixon killed four Oakland police officers. Some residents link the two incidents.

First, a horrific piece of news that unfortunately will [...]

GOSL says human rights prolong war

AFP photo: Troops capture an almost-deserted city of Mullaitivu.

Groups including the UN, Care, and local organization Sarvodaya have now been accused of being “pro-war” because they’ve pressured the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) to respect human rights.  Care was the only group mentioned by name in the statement.  According to the Washington Post,

The military, in [...]

Dr. Doom is now guardedly optimistic

Nouriel Roubini may be about to get kicked out of the pessimism porn club as he now is saying if governments continue being proactive, we may survive this thing after all.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul raises the bar for disaster chic, saying we have a 15-year depression coming – but then he’s been a nutball buy-guns-and-gold [...]

Inventor of Ethernet calls for creation of Enternet

Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, is calling for a national energy network modeled after the Internet. Make it smart, resilient, with cheap, plentiful power, he says.

Earth2tech summarizes his main points, which include

“It’s easier to teach energy to the entrepreneurs than to teach entrepreneurship to the energy industry,” so take advantage of Silicon [...]

Green Party dissidents topple Czech Republic government

Czech Republic Green Party For those who say that working within parliamentary systems is pointless.

From Another Green World

Just got the news!

I wish I could say this was Ireland….the dissident Green Party MPs have swung the vote and toppled the centre-right government.

Why the Greens were in government with a Czech conservative [...]

Doug Kass: I was right, that was the market bottom

Doug Kass called a market bottom on March 2. He says events now confirm that and his watch list of twelve economic indicators shows things are improving.

A classical wall of worry is being reinforced by an overwhelming consensus that the recent advance was a bear market rally. Moreover, the negative “chatter,” as Jim “El [...]

Why Sri Lanka burns, Part I

(AP photo.)

Recently, I posted here about the current slaughter in Sri Lanka– tens of thousands of civilians killed because neither side will let them leave the battlefield.  In response, one reader called my “evenhandedness” “insipid.”  He ascribes to the party line that the LTTE are freedom fighters justified by decades of Sinhala oppression against [...]

World’s biggest wind farm

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