Great to see the heads of mega banks fulminating against fiction and innuendo as a 'careless talk costs banks' ethos is pounded into their employees and rivals are threatened with retaliation for daring to speculate (ahem) on their illiquidity... a bit like the last season of The Wire, which is looking mighty prophetic in its articulation of the relations between lies, non-reproduction and the (more or less open) collapse of once 'great' institutions.

While bird flu panic made a return to the UK mainland last autumn, the promised pandemic failed to materialise. What does continue to evolve, however, are repressive forms of population management sustained by hypothetical threats of megadeath – writes C. L-Stavrides

OK this is hardly a scoop – even Fidel Castro has got his two contraband cents' worth in – but the basic Green agenda of making the poor pay (more) for their own reproduction could hardly be better illustrated than by exponential basic food price inflation caused by transfer of essential agriculture to biofuel production.  Environmentalism and 'neoliberal' capital are not strange bedfellows: they were joined at the pinhead from birth, as their shared hallucination of Scarcity goes to show.