Fair Trade

From: Fair Trade and the Food Movement - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

The problem with Fair Trade coffee is that as the program scales up, the alternative market ethics it wants to sustain collapse. Inevitably, the Fair Trade market becomes subject to the same laws that drive the conventional commodities market. When the price of coffee drops, the appeal of Fair Trade’s price support lures growers into the cooperatives that sell coffee under the Fair Trade label. As poor growers rush into Fair Trade agreements, the supply of Fair Trade coffee rises. Protected by the price floor, the Fair Trade coffee remains inflated despite flagging demand. What Fair Trade importers thus end up doing with the excess Fair Trade coffee is dumping it—upwards of 75 percent of it!—on the conventional market.

Gita Sahgal, a freethinker

Meet Gita Sahgal, a freethinker and a former head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat. In her statement to The Times, Gita reveals how Amnesty interprets "human rights":

“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in an email to the organisation’s leaders on January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

The censorship of "Putin: The dark rise to power"

The following article was originally published in GQ in September 2009:

Putin: The dark rise to power: "Ten years ago this month, Russia was rocked by a series of mysterious apartment bombings that left hundreds dead. It was by riding the ensuing wave of fear and terror that a then largely unknown Vladimir Putin rose to become the most powerful man in the country. But there were questions about the nature of those bombings - and disturbing evidence that the perpetrators might actually have been working for the Russian government. In the years since then, the people who had been questioning the official version of events began one by one to go silent or even turn up dead. Except one man. Scott Anderson finds him."

A powerful tale, true or not, on power and corruption.

What reinforces the suspicion that this story is more than yet another wacky conspiracy theory is the effort that GQ spent on suppressing it, including, but not limited to, removing any mention from its cover, withdrawing it from its Website, and removing it from its Russian versions. The picture this affair draws on the state of human rights in the former soviet empire is not encouraging.