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More than 70 percent of all the antibiotics used in the United States are given to animals.

Agribusiness groups disagree and say the main problem is overuse of antibiotic treatments for people. Bugs rarely migrate from animals to people, and even when they do, the risk they pose to human health is negligible, the industry contends.

He is comparing the genetic sequences of E. coli germs resistant to multiple antibiotics found in the meat samples to the ones that have caused urinary tract infections in people (mostly women).

U.S.D.A. does not stand alone. The Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), knowing that manufacturers grow animals under conditions virtually guaranteed to breed disease, allows them to attempt to ward off disease by feeding them antibiotics from birth until death. (This despite the stated intention of the agency to change that, and a court order requiring it to.)

About a quarter of all chicken parts are contaminated,

The F.D.A. must disallow the use of prophylactic antibiotics in animal production.

As King struggled with the crisis, he concluded that the biggest vulnerability was the solvency of the banking system itself. The crash wasn’t just a liquidity squeeze caused by toxic assets; the problem was that big banks around the world were undercapitalized and, in many cases, insolvent.

King pushed the banks to recapitalize and, later, to accept more regulation. This upset a financial elite that, as King says, was the only sector of the British economy that had escaped the market revolution of the Margaret Thatcher years.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.

Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon

Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.

For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.

Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company

In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

The Global Economy’s Tale Risks

Fluctuations in the world’s economies are largely due to the stories we hear and tell about them. These popular, emotionally relevant narratives sometimes inspire us to go out and spend, start businesses, build new factories and office buildings, and hire employees; at other times, they put fear in our hearts and impel us to sit tight, save our resources, curtail spending, and reduce risk. They either stimulate our “animal spirits” or muffle them.

The output gap for the world’s major advanced economies, as calculated by the IMF, remains disappointing, at -3.2% in 2013, which is less than half-way back to normal from 2009, the worst year of the global financial crisis, when the gap was -5.3%.

GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea’s bauxite industry

“Rather than making people richer, mining has made them poorer,” said Akoumba Diallo, a mining sector researcher. “It polluted their environments so they can’t grow crops or let animals feed near mining sites. And it is hard to get water anywhere because it’s contaminated.” With mining contributing to 85 percent of the country’s external revenue, and the World Bank estimating investments of up to US$20 billion in bauxite mining in Guinea over the next decade, the government is currently rewriting and renegotiating its mining contracts - unchanged for 25 years - with 15 companies to ensure Guineans are more likely to benefit from the wealth they spawn.

Mining companies are legally obliged to pay taxes to owners of the land they mine,