Jaw-droppingly sycophantic piece about the pawnbroking industry on the BBC's business website. If you look very hard, you'll find the mentions of company profits up by 50% since the credit crunch began, the 1000% interest rate charged on "pay day advance" loans; and annual interest rate of 100%.

Credit unions, non-profit organisations that perform the same role as pawnbrokers in providing cash advances to those on low-incomes get a 10-word sentence at the end of the article.

Compare & contrast. Talks on people who can't afford food; and protests by people who don't want to pay more for fuel.

Worth noting that Gordon Brown is using the food crisis to push a late-90s neoliberal globalisation agenda. If you remove trade barriers then, he argues, the poor can sell the food (which they already can't afford to buy) to other countries (who need it for their cars).

On April 17th 2008, activist from seven different european countries blocked the soy factory of Cargill in Ghent (Belgium) for a whole day long. Not one single truck of soy was able to enter or leave the factory.

More info on: http://lasojamata.org/en/node/135

Jenni Marrow, the community activist and chairwoman of Muirhouse/Salvesen Community Council who fought and won against Council's Stock Transfer with EAST, died last Monday in what is believed to be a heart attack. Her funeral will be at Warriston at 2pm on Wednesday. More info in the Scotsman article: http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Shock-death-of--campaigner.4117837.jp

 This is your Invitation to the Second Global Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes. Feel free to forward/post/publish to all appropriate people and places/sites.

A nuclear submarine crashed after tracing paper was used to mark its course, it has emerged. HMS Trafalgar ran aground during a training exercise off the coast of Skye in November 2002. A Royal Navy board of inquiry criticised the decision to put tracing paper over charts so student officers could not draw on them. It said the tracing paper obscured vital information that could have prevented the crash. An estimated £5m of damage was caused to the hull of the 4,750 tonne submarine when HMS Trafalgar smashed into the seabed off a small island called Fladda-chuain. Full story