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"To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana - one of the front lines of this war - is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando - an event that no longer shocks the country."

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Protest works. Just look at the proof, Against Market Fundamentalism, Against Tyranny, British Politics,  Johann Hari

How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won, Against Market Fundamentalism, American Politics, Johann Hari

The laws and policies of the legislature of the United States of America are now effectively on eBay, for sale to the highest bidder. Are you a Wall Street boss who wants to party like it's 2007? Are you a Big Coal baron who wants to burn, baby, burn? Are you an insurance company that wants to be able to kick sick people off your rolls? Meet John Boehner, the most powerful Republican and soon-to-be Speaker of the House. But -- of course! -- you already have. Here's an example of how you have worked together. In 1995, the House was going to finally repeal subsidies for growing tobacco, because an addictive cancer-causing drug didn't seem like the most deserving recipient of taxpayers' cash -- until Boehner walked the floor of the House handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to his fellow elected representatives. They changed their minds. The subsidy stayed. Explaining his check-dispensing, Boehner says: "It's gone on here for a long time." So get your bids in: The House is open for business.

Thom Hartmann talks to Ryan Clayton, US Uncut (http://usuncut.org/) and Johann Hari, The Nation Magazine about the US and UK Uncut.

Scramble the film backwards. Rewind. Go back to the day 10 years ago when the air here in Manhattan was thick with ash and Osama bin Laden was gloating. There were two options for the United States government -- to pick up a scalpel, or to pick up a blowtorch. With the scalpel, you go after the fundamentalist murderers responsible with patient policing and intelligence work, and steadily drain them of their support. With the blowtorch, you invade a slew of countries with a great blunderbuss of slaughter and torture -- and swell the army of enraged jihadis determined to kill. History branched in two possible directions that day.

An eye opening article from the Huffington Post on the origins of Somali pirates, and why the world has suddenly turned against them.

Over the past decade, an old word once used in the Maoist gulags has come back to China. It is "gulaosi" - and it is used to describe the men and women who are literally being worked to death producing clothes, electronics and toys for you and me.

We are emerging now from a long dream- boom, built on a mess of financial trickery rather than on producing anything worthwhile. In the Nineties and the noughties we didn't become more efficient or more productive - we simply became better at being conned. All the "triumphs of deregulation" bragged about by market fundamentalists from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair were built on a nitroglycerine- base of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. The profits went almost entirely to the richest one per cent, while the bill after the burst goes to all of us.

On the night he won, I too shed a little tear; but the people weeping today are those having their homes repossessed