I chatted with some of my kid's friends - currently @ university - they paint a picture of their generation as being totally distrustful of government, politicians, the media and the financial system. They view companies as only out to take as much money off them as possible and they see those in power as cynical, self-interested people who don't have their best interests at heart. Most don't read a newspaper and get their news online from a wide range of sources - bloggers, social media etc. Those who are on the escalator to a job and a career are pretty damning about youff culture - the Chav generation - of reality TV, obssessed with celebs and football. They fully expect the financial system to collapse sooner or later and seem to relish this possibility so that they can fundamentally remould society when it does - more just, less polluting, less violent seems to be the aim.

The proportion of adults who believe climate change is "definitely" a reality dropped by 30% over the last year, from 44% to 31%, in the latest survey by Ipsos Mori.

What I don't understand is that we've been here so often before. Why do people listen to the propaganda of oil companies and the like over scientific evidence? How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes by propagandists denying that smoking causes cancer, denying that CFCs lead to ozone depletion, denying that certain pollutants cause acid rain or denying that climate change is manmade (or, originally, that it even existed)?

This is a great time to be born, a great time to be alive. This generation gets to completely change the world we live in. We have a chance here to reimagine every single thing we do. But, no, perhaps we'd rather go down with the ship and listen to rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro and yen from their investments in outdated industries.

There was a segment covering the topic on CBS's 60 minutes Sunday night, including an interview with K.R. Sridhar, which can watch online here.

Iraq's Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.

… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.

Alex von Tunzelmann, writing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:

The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

Were an idiot like you to itemise the myriad things that this most wretched of disaster zones currently lacked, chances are you'd omit "militant Scientologists who claim post-traumatic stress is a conspiracy created by the evil psychiatric profession, and who believe the correct response to extreme shock is to touch sufferers with one finger, before attempting to convert them to the ways of Hubbard".

It seems to me that without having any structure on the ground in terms of distribution, that an airdrop is simply going to lead to riots as people try and go after that stuff … It seems to me that's a formula for contributing to chaos rather than preventing it.

Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression. Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums.

Now is exactly the time to inject some realism into the discourse. I've been reading/listening to reports from the Western media, and they are full of revisions and distortions concerning our historical role there. 'Haiti is a failed state,' 'Aristide 'fled,' was 'forced out by a rebellion,' etc., ignoring the deliberate campaign of destabilisation and coup d'etat against the democratically elected government in 2004.

Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.

To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.

But while this might explain why so many are ready and willing to be duped into thinking man-made climate change is a conspiracy, it doesn't seem to explain why so many are duped. Turns out there's an explanation for that:

Think environmentalists are stooges? You're the unwitting recruit of a hugely powerful oil lobby – I've got the proof.

I have placed on the Guardian's website four case studies; each of which provides a shocking example of how the denial industry works.

Remember this the next time you hear people claiming that climate scientists are only in it for the money, or that environmentalists are trying to create a communist world government: these ideas were devised and broadcast by energy companies. The people who inform me, apparently without irony, that "your article is an ad hominem attack, you four-eyed, big-nosed, commie sack of shit", or "you scaremongers will destroy the entire world economy and take us back to the Stone Age", are the unwitting recruits of campaigns they have never heard of.

Calculations based on the trust's figures show the 10 tonnes emitted by a return flight from London to Sydney would be offset by enabling the avoidance of one unwanted birth in a country such as Kenya.

So one African's life is worth the carbon emissions of one flight from London to Sydney? Something tells me the African is not the problem in this equation.

Providing the means for women to avoid an unwanted birth is an admiral pursuit but, really, offsetting the over consumption of people in rich countries to fund it?

US militarism has to be considered under three headings: First, the US military is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel in the world. Second, the US economy, the largest national consumer of fossil fuel in the world, has shown that its primary mode of maintaining a supply of fossil fuel for itself is through military action (assault, intervention, occupation of other oil producing nations). Third, the US military operates in the interest of a corporate economy of which it (the military) is the foremost sector in the US.

[The town of] Bundanoon's battle against the bottle has been brewing for years, ever since a Sydney-based beverage company announced plans to build a water extraction plant in the town. Residents were furious over the prospect of an outsider taking their water, trucking it up to Sydney for processing and then selling it back to them. The town is still fighting the company's proposal in court.

Then in March, Huw Kingston, who owns the town's combination cafe and bike shop, had a thought: If the town was so against hosting a water bottling company, why not ban the end product?

On Wednesday, 356 people turned up for a vote — the biggest turnout ever at a town meeting. Only two people voted no. One said he was worried banning bottled water would encourage people to drink sugary drinks. The other was Geoff Parker, director of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute — which represents the bottled water industry.