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The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.

“Starvation is near,

Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.

It’s probably more accurate to call breakfast the most dangerous meal of the day. Not only because of the sugar in so many breakfast cereals, but also because the refined grains they’re made of are virtually the same thing, once they reach your bloodstream.

All the cereal, whole grain or not, is processed in a way to give it indefinite shelf life. As the nutritious parts of our food are what goes bad on the shelf, just about every processed-grain product on the shelf is nutritionally barren.

refined wheat, rice and corn, what most mainstream American breakfast cereals are primarily composed of, is quickly converted to sugar on entering your system, requiring that exact same insulin response.

To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.

Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.

Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes.

Voltaire once remarked that Parisians required only “the comic opera and white bread.”

The storming of the medieval fortress of Bastille on July 14, 1789 began as a hunt for arms—and grains to make bread. 

bread shortages played a role in stoking anger toward the monarchy.

DAKAR, Senegal — With many of the world’s poorest countries facing alarming levels of hunger and starvation, the leader of the African Union is set to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday and urge him to lift Russia’s blockade on urgently needed cereals and fertilizer from Ukraine.

Warnings by the United Nations that Russia’s naval blockade in Ukraine could lead to famines around the world, and accusations by Ukrainian and Western leaders that Mr. Putin is weaponizing a major source of the world’s food supply, have so far produced limited results. Millions of to

ns of grain remain stuck in Ukraine; Mr. Putin has suggested that this would change if the West lifted sanctions imposed on Moscow after the invasion.

or nearly a century, a wooden tower has loomed over the prairie town of Andrew in western Canada, rising from the rolling landscape land like a lone sentinel. Built during the agricultural boom of the early 20th century, the grain elevator – and six others that stood nearby – once bore testament to the town’s prosperity.

Andrew is no stranger to loss: over the years, jobs and residents have slowly dwindled. But when its last remaining grain elevator was slated for demolition, the community battled hard to win a stay of execution. “Trying to save this thing was like praying to God,” said Dave Cuthbert, a resident. “You were never certain if your voice was being heard.”

In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.

scientists have found associations between UPFs and a range of health conditions, including heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinal diseases and depression, as well as earlier death.

That’s concerning, experts say, since ultraprocessed foods have become a major part of people’s diets worldwide. They account for 67 percent of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States

What are ultraprocessed foods, exactly? And how strong is the evidence that they’re harmful? We asked experts to answer these

Demand started to ramp up in 2007, when Customs data show that the U.S. imported 7.3 million pounds of quinoa. Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods began carrying the seed soon after, and the U.S. bought 57.6 million pounds in 2012, with 2013 imports projected at 68 million pounds

And yet, prices are skyrocketing; they tripled between 2006 and 2011, and now hover between $4.50 and $8 per pound on the shelf.

Part of it is that Peru itself, already the world’s biggest consumer of quinoa, patriotically started including the stuff in school lunch subsidies and maternal welfare programs.

Farmers and grain traders are nervous that China might retaliate by slowing imports of U.S. beans or by erecting trade barriers to them. Chinese officials in February said they would investigate whether the U.S. subsidizes sorghum exports to the country after the Trump administration slapped tariffs on goods like solar panels that are manufactured by Chinese companies.

the world’s largest soybean processor, said in February that he hoped tension between Washington and Beijing dies down. “It’s better that calm minds figure out good things,” he said. “There is a lot of noise and some disruptions in the supply chains coming out of the U.S.”

U.S. farmers hoping to tap that market are growing more soybeans than ever. Many planted soybeans in fields long used for corn and wheat after prices for those grains dropped in recent years. Soybean acreage is on track to match corn this year for the first time in 35 years.

Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.

As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.

Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.

North Koreans are experiencing widespread hunger and dying of starvation as the country suffers one of the worst food crises in decades as a result of its international isolation and natural disasters that have damaged crops, reducing yields.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered officials to resolve the food-supply problems with better farming equipment and scientific methods

the situation worsened in recent months as a result of its border restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic and floods and droughts last year that hurt its harvests. Last May, North Korea reported its second-worst drought since the country began measurements in 1981, affecting the capital city of Pyongyang and nearby provinces. Over the summer, towns along the border with China flooded after heavy rainfall.    

So gun production, in fact, didn’t herald the start of the industrial revolution? The process did give rise to some important technology, but in terms of impact on the growth of the economy it was tiny. The real secret of American growth was its mass-produced natural goods such as meat, grain, oil and timber. We had portable steam-turbine sawmills that could saw logs into rough planks as the trees came down. Everything that we did became mass-produced.

We are now producing shale gas. The output, in terms of energy, will soon be as great as Saudi Arabia’s oil output is right now. In the 2020s all of North America will be energy independent and America will probably be a net exporter. We are seeing steel and chemical companies moving back from overseas. I

one reasonable forecast shows a million manufacturing-related jobs out of the gas boom by 2017. That’s $350 billion of economic activity driven by this, a 2% addition to annual GDP. I think there’s a good case for optimism.

By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.

Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.

deep cuts in oil use and emissions of greenhouse gases from cars and light trucks are possible in the United States by 2050, but only with a mix of diverse and intensified research and policies far stronger than those pursued so far by the Obama administration.

by the year 2050, the U.S. may be able to reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent for light-duty vehicles -- cars and small trucks -- via a combination of more efficient vehicles; the use of alternative fuels like biofuels, electricity, and hydrogen; and strong government policies to overcome high costs and influence consumer choices.

"In addition, alternative fuels to petroleum must be readily available, cost-effective and produced with low emissions of greenhouse gases.  Such a transition will be costly and require several decades.

It’s crunch time for the Affordable Care Act.Days after a long, thorough speech from President Obama defending the law and laying out his vision for it in the years ahead, the administration released confirmation of what the industry had been signaling for most of the past few months: double-digit percentage point premium increases for benchmark plans for people insured through plans purchased on the Obamacare insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, this upcoming year.

Young people are still slow to sign up, premiums have steadily risen in the exchanges, and big insurers like Aetna have left the exchanges, leaving several counties and at least one entire state with only one insurer.

Republicans seeking to destroy the law, and Democrats who have become increasingly vocal about further reforms or radical changes to the law. But will the bad news about Obamacare actually affect the election in a meaningful way?

“You shouldn’t be outside! Don’t know you know there’s a ‘shelter in place’?”

Nineteen workers—the first responders to this emergency— narrowly escaped death at the scene of the accident. As the conflagration continued, a towering plume of toxic smoke spiraled up and then over much of downwind Richmond, reaching several other East Bay communities as well.

Chevron fire was judged to be a Level 3 incident, the highest level of danger

A comprehensive new review of research on episodes of carbon-driven disruption of ocean and climate conditions over the last 300 million years shows the power of a big pulse of carbon dioxide to profoundly affect the environment.The review, which is being published in the journal Science on Friday, concludes that the human-driven buildup of carbon dioxide under way now appears to be far outpacing past natural events, meaning that, for ocean chemistry particularly, the biological implications are potentially enormous — and laden with the kind of uncertainty that is hard to see as a source of comfort.

The beauty of looking in the rock record is you don’t have to run a computer model to see what’s going to happen. You see the whole thing. When you put say 2,000 gigatons [billion tons] or thereby of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly a certain number of things happen. It gets hot. The oceans get acid. They run short of oxygen and as a result quite a number of animals become extinct. And in the rock record what you see subsequently is the extinction event is recorded, and you see the draw-down over a period of 100,000 or 200,000 years of the carbon from the atmosphere, which is manifested on the floor of the ocean as a development of a carbon-rich mudstone. It’s just a very fine-grained rock. It’s just a stinking black mud laid down on the floor of the ocean.

The people who are saying to us, we’re carrying out an experiment with Earth and we don’t really know the outcome, well that sounds dramatic but strictly speaking it’s not true. Earth itself has run the experiment several times — 183 million years ago, something very comparable.The fascinating thing that seems to be emerging is, as we look at … the 1,000-year timescales going back to 183 million years, other past warming events where we get these black mudstones, we find that whatever the starting conditions, amazingly you get the same outcome. Every time you pull this particular carbon trigger at a certain rate and dump it into the atmosphere, that’s what you get.

The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more).

I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.

What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.