Honeybees dying, situation ‘unheard of’ →

Just last year, it seemed there was something to celebrate despite planet Earth’s ongoing honeybee apocalypse: Bee colony losses were down. Not by enough, but they were down.
“It’s better news than it could have been,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a University of Maryland entomology professor who led a survey of bee populations that reported a loss of 23 percent of bee colonies — less than 30 percent, the average from 2005 to 2013. “It’s not good news.”
Though scientists cited progress in battles against an Asian mite that has killed many an American bee, they had words of caution.
“One year does not make a trend,” Jeff Pettis, a co-author of the survey who heads the federal government’s bee research laboratory in Beltsville, Md., told the New York Times.
Turns out Pettis was right. VanEngelsdorp and other researchers at the Bee Informed Partnership, affiliated with the Department of Agriculture, just announced more than 40 percent of honeybee hives died this past year, as the Associated Press reported. The number is preliminary, but is the second-highest annual loss recorded to date.
“What we’re seeing with this bee problem is just a loud signal that there’s some bad things happening with our agro-ecosystems,” study co-author Keith Delaplane of the University of Georgia told the AP. “We just happen to notice it with the honeybee because they are so easy to count.”
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The state worst affected was Oklahoma, which lost more than 60 percent of its hives. Hawaii escaped relatively unscathed, losing less than 14 percent.
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The USDA estimated that honeybees add more than $15 billion to the value of the country’s crops per year.

World population-food supply balance is becoming increasingly unstable, study finds →

One of the most important long-term issues to watch:

The study assesses the food supply available to more than 140 nations (with populations greater than 1 million) and demonstrates that food security is becoming increasingly susceptible to perturbations in demographic growth, as humanity places increasing pressure on use of limited land and water resources.
"In the past few decades there has been an intensification of international food trade and an increase in the number of countries that depend on food imports," said Paolo D'Odorico, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and one of the study's authors. "On average, about one-fourth of the food we eat is available to us through international trade. This globalization of food may contribute to the spread of the effects of local shocks in food production throughout the world."

North Korea executes defence chief with an anti-aircraft gun: South Korea agency →

Kim had previously ordered the execution of 15 senior officials this year as punishment for challenging his authority, according to the NIS. In all, some 70 officials have been executed since Kim took over after his father's death in 2011, Yonhap news agency cited the NIS as saying.
"There is no clear or present danger to Kim Jong Un's leadership or regime stability, but if this continues to happen into next year, then we should seriously start to think about revising our scenarios on North Korea," said Michael Madden, an expert on the country's leadership who contributes to the 38 North think tank in Washington.

I was an undercover Uber driver →

Uber is run by sociopaths. It's depressing how this seems to be the way forward from the sclerotic cab system. Uber could be using its genius and data to benefit everyone; instead, its executives are getting rich by regularly cutting its drivers' rates, while sticking them with nearly all the liability.

Vatican to Recognize Palestinian State in New Treaty →

The Vatican said Wednesday that it had concluded a treaty to recognize Palestinian statehood, a symbolic but significant step welcomed by Palestinians but upsetting to the Israeli government.
Formal recognition of a Palestinian state by the Vatican, which has deep religious interests in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories that include Christian holy sites, lends a powerful signal of moral authority and legitimacy to the efforts by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, to achieve statehood despite the long paralyzed Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Israel has grown increasingly alarmed about the increased international acceptance of Palestine as a state since the United Nations upgraded the Palestinian delegation’s status in 2012 to that of a nonmember observer state. A number of European countries have also signaled their acceptance of Palestinian statehood.
A statement from a joint commission of Vatican and Palestinian diplomatic officials, posted on the Vatican news website, said “the work of the commission on the text of the agreement has been concluded,” and that it would be submitted for formal approval and for signing “in the near future.”

Ghost Cities of China by Wade Shepard review – unpopulated replica towns explained →

Fascinating look at how China has made this at all possible:

Once built, the newly urbanised area often stays depopulated for a few years, as it is more expensive for investors to properly fit out and let their flats, so they sit on them until – as inevitably happens – the Communist party induces businesses to move to the area, usually by opening a new branch of a university and extending a metro out to each “ghost city”; benefits, such as free transport, low rents or even a couple of years rent-free are offered and are usually effective.
So few places remain ghost cities for long. And if they exemplify a problem, it is rising inequality, rather than a precarious economy. The property bubble is unlikely to burst, as local authorities are merely one (municipal) branch of the Communist party owing money to another (banking) branch, which has no interest in making its comrades bankrupt. Milton Friedman, Shepard notes, saw Pudong, Shanghai’s Central Business District, in its early form as a ghost city, or rather a “statist monument to a dead pharaoh”. It is now one of the most bustling, populated places on Earth.