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How much should people in Britain worry about food security?  Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence [...]

On the front of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, via John Robb - a sign of things to come, perhaps:

BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. “I’d rather see [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

Utilitarian philosopher (and celebrity corpse) Jeremy Bentham famously proposed a “Panopticon” design for a prison: a circular building, with the warder sat at its center able to see all the inmates in their cells around him at all times. The warder would have to be hidden behind Venetian blinds to conceal who he was looking at, [...]

From Der Spiegel via Matt Yglesias: Hasbro is planning to launch the first global version of Monopoly, and they’re canvassing votes for which cities should be included.  As Der Spiegel puts it, cities all over the world are urging residents to “vote early and vote often”: for
Forget a seat on the United Nations Security Council. [...]

The NY Times has this sorry tale:
Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army. This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of [...]

Regular readers will know that we do love a good old-fashioned urban panic here at Global Dashboard.  So imagine the delight here when Bruce Schneier noted yesterday that Paul Torrens of the Arizona State University School of Geographical Sciences has devised a new computer simulation that models urban panic. Torrens’ own website has some very cool [...]

Chances are good that last time you found yourself channel-surfing in the US, you will have happened across a rather fatuous news show called The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN.  It’s all very dramatic with pom-pa-pa-pom sort of music in the background and natty graphics.  But Barry Crimmins is unimpressed - as this highly [...]

Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050″ kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,
That’s three months before there’s not enough water [...]

Chris Giles in the FT has a useful corrective to a commonplace nostrum that often does the rounds: namely, that the UK has become so dependent on strong performance in the financial services sector that if the Square Mile’s economy goes belly-up, it’ll take the rest of us with it. “So wealthy are the thousands [...]

First, the Economist on the role ‘amateur’ health care workers can play in building public health systems:
The idea is to harness people’s existing culture of self-help and get subsistence farmers to carry out simple medical tasks which are beyond the capacity of a pathetically inadequate health system…
In Congo alone, the [World Health Organisation] has recruited [...]

(Hat-tip: Crooks and Liars)

Regular readers of GlobalDashboard know that we’re big fans of fourth generation warfare theorists William Lind and John Robb. Both writers have warned persistently that 4GW isn’t just something that happens “over there”, in Anbar or Helmand. It’s “over here”, too, whether “here” is low-intensity war in Mexico (see the Economist on Mexico’s [...]

Wired has a story about a new technology being rolled out with the Police in Oakland, California: microphones have been dotted around a rough neighbourhood, and when they pick up the sound of a gunshot, they immediately triangulate its exact location and route the information through to laptops in police cars, where the information is [...]

Three new exhibitions have opened up in New York about the controversial urban planner Robert Moses. Moses was the architect of the New York World’s Fair in 1964-65, the rather sad-looking remnants of which you see as you take a cab into Manhattan from JFK airport. Much more fundamentally, though, he was the [...]