Martin Luther King Jr: "only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

• Because of rising food prices and the gnawing hunger borne of widespread poverty, many Haitians have recently begun protesting their government and have even stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
• One person died during riots caused by rising food-prices in the West-African country, Ivory Coast. “The protests are linked to the high price of oil, the growing demand for bio-fuels and the expanding economies of Asia and Latin America, our correspondent says.” To explain: bio-fuel, that more-or-less clean-burning source of energy, is made from corn, palm oil, sugar, and some other crops. So with a greater demand for bio-fuel, there’s been a corresponding increase in the price of those food items. So, people already hovering around the poverty line are now starving. But there may be a way out. “One solution: make biofuel from nonfood crops. DaimlerChrysler, for example, is promoting jatropha, a thorny plant that grows on marginal land in Latin America, Africa and India. With intensive labor, it yields high-quality biodiesel without boosting food prices. In fact, it has no value as food; it's poisonous.”
• Bio-fuel is not the cause of all the current food ills in the world though. There have been dramatic increases in the cost, and decreases in the supply, of rice in places like the Philippines for very different reasons.
• Burma is officially a military dictatorship and, after the monks led a protest against the state only to find their selves imprisoned, tortured, and killed, it made perfect sense many Burmese would flee. But sadly, some have left one cell for another. In neighboring Thailand, they are granted very few rights as migrant workers and experience regular abuse. Here: “Unregistered migrant workers often face poor working conditions, low wages, exploitation by employees, and are prey to extortion by authorities and deportation to Burma if caught. While there is a bilateral agreement between the Thai and Burmese governments on managing labor migration, it has yet to be fully implemented, and the formal process is slow, expensive, and restrictive to certain occupations.”
• The Chinese government has sent a clear message it wants to keep its more outspoken citizens in line, stiff and quiet, in the lead-up to the Olympics, by sentencing the prominent human rights activist, Hu Jia, to jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. If the International Olympic Committee granted China the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games because the added attention would soften and civilize their approach to dissidents, as some have said, they might tragically be wrong.