Wasted food in China could feed 200 million

China is in the midst of a high-profile 'Clean Your Plate Campaign' aimed at reducing the staggering amount of food that is heaved into wastebins across the country every single day.

Each year China wastes enough food to feed 200 million people or one-sixth of the country's 1.3 billion population according to state news agency Xinhua. Further, about 50 million tonnes of grain, or a tenth of the country's annual production is also wasted.

John Brennan and the “So-Called” Americans

“One of the problems is, once the drone program is so public, and one American is caught up, people don’t know much about this one ‘American citizen’—so called,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, in her questioning of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee for C.I.A. director, on Thursday. (John Cassidy has more on the hearing.) She was referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in Yemen, in 2011, and was a “so-called” American because he was an American, born in New Mexico. “They don’t know what he’s been doing,” Feinstein continued. “They don’t know the incitement he has stirred up. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Mr. Awlaki and what he’s been doing.”

American Airlines, US Airways Merger Likely A Bad Deal For Customers: Consumer Advocates

Air travelers may end up losing big in a deal that would create the largest airline in the U.S., consumer advocates told The Huffington Post, after various leaks this week suggested such a merger was imminent.

Reports in the financial media Thursday and Friday noted that after months of complicated haggling, US Airways and the bankrupt parent company of American Airlines were almost ready to announce a corporate marriage.

Torture and Taboo: On Elaine Scarry

We are disturbed about torture—yet again. What incest was for Oedipus and his Greek audience, torture is for us: the polluting stink that incites outrage and demands expiation. Even before its release in December, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, was engulfed in a controversy over several scenes that seem to show that torture is effective. Three members of the Senate released a highly unusual statement, insisting that in its representation of torture, the film should have clearly condemned and rejected the practice. In a note to his staff, Michael Morell, the acting director of the CIA, worried that the film suggested in too simplistic a way that torture was instrumental in locating our quarry. (He left open the question of whether torture ever works.) On the News Desk blog of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer—whose investigative reporting for that magazine on the CIA’s policy of extraordinary renditions, “black site” prisons and the brutal interrogation of terrorism suspects did so much to spark the current debate on torture—took especially angry exception, writing that if Bigelow “were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.” Mayer contends that Zero Dark Thirty not only falsifies history; it also disturbs a long-settled consensus that torture never produces useful intelligence and, for the sake of a Hollywood buck, risks a return to the ethically unthinkable. “Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?” Mayer asked. It was a rhetorical question.

The Missing Link in Obama's Liberalism

Consensus! Left and right agree that Barack Obama not only gave a powerfully liberal inaugural address, but that he touched on all the important bases. “In effect, Mr. Obama endorsed the entire liberal agenda as the guiding star of his next four years in the White House,” wrote Fred Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. New Yorker editor David Remnick called it “Barack Obama without apology—a liberal emboldened by political victory and a desire to enter the history books with a progressive agenda.”

Search for budget watchdog hamstrung by job description, critics say

OTTAWA — The parliamentarian librarian has begun the search for an executive to replace budget watchdog Kevin Page with a salary and job description that some say will further weaken the office and its independence.

Page reports to Parliamentary Librarian Sonia L’Heureux who is putting together a search committee and has hired headhunters Renaud Foster to find a mid-level executive to take over the job — a move critics say rules out any serious “heavy-hitter” finance executives from either the public or private sectors.

Tories introduce new bill for mentally ill offenders

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says proposed changes to the Criminal Code would include stringent restrictions for people found not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder.

His announcement Friday in Burnaby, B.C., came after the federal government tabled Bill C-54 in Parliament earlier in the day.

Harper said the changes would create a new legal designation to protect the public from an accused person designated as "high-risk non-criminally responsible."

Interim PBO not an option under law, government saysca

OTTAWA — The Conservative government says the law doesn’t allow the appointment of an interim parliamentary budget officer to fill in until a successor is hired to replace Kevin Page.

Andrea Mandel-Campbell, a spokeswoman for Treasury Board President Tony Clement, said the legislation has no provisions to appoint an interim or acting budget officer if a new replacement is not found before Page’s five-year term expires in late March.

We can choose not to export coal in B.C.

“Seems like it's a problem we probably have to get used to,” said conservative CNN commentator Erick Erickson about climate change, “as opposed to something we can cure.” In a segment lampooning the curious habit of conservatives rejecting the fact of human-caused global warming only to eventually claim it’s too late to do anything about it, Stephen Colbert summed it up well: “Erickson has finally hit the fifth stage of conservative climate change grief: denial, denial, denial, denial, and acceptance.”

This mystifying, and disingenuous, change of heart is visible practically everywhere now -- including in the debate over coal. Terminal ports around the Pacific Northwest are planning on shipping coal abroad, particularly to China. And the rationalization is, basically, that it’s too late to do anything about it -- so we might as well sell it off and get the tax revenues and the jobs before someone else does.

40 per cent of Canadians want a reformed Senate, 31 per cent want it abolished: Forum Research poll

PARLIAMENT HILL—In the wake of the latest controversies involving allegations of wrongdoing by Senators, including two appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a new poll shows Canadians who want an elected Senate outnumber those who want it abolished it entirely.

But, even though only 14 per cent of respondents said the Senate should be left as it is, the Forum Research survey suggests if Mr. Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) succeeds in his Supreme Court of Canada quest to take incremental steps toward an elected Senate, the political turmoil could be significant.