Despite graduating about 400,000 engineers and scientists every year, India is already starting to wonder whether it will have enough in the future to meet the demands of globalization.

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From CTV.ca:

U.S. scientists have been pressured to make their writings on global warming fit with the Bush administration's skepticism on the topic, a U.S. Congressional committee has been told.

A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists found 150 climate scientists had personally experienced political interference in their work over the past five years. The survey had 279 respondents.

At least 435 incidents were recorded, representatives of the watchdog group told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change,' 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," said Francesca Grifo.

More than 1,000 of the 4,400 Afghans who died in conflict-related violence in 2006 were civilians, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.

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The Beeb with some detail on a messianic Shiite cult involved in a major gun battle in Najaf, Iraq that left at least 200 of its members dead.

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Writing in the NYT magazine, Michael Pollan has the following advice:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

He went on to take some shots at some key players as to why the act of eating hs become so incredibly complicated and confusing:

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

The Age newspaper in Australia has obtained an early draft of the second installment of the IPCC fourth assessment, and it doesn't bode well for the Land Down Under.

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Harood Rashid of the BBC's Urdu service recently travelled to South Waziristan and managed to obtain an interview with Mullah Baitullah Mehsud, leader of a Taliban militia there.

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I prepared a backgrounder for CTV.ca on what to expect in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report expected Friday.

While looking through some climate change-related photos on Monday evening, one caption for a Reuters photo claimed that 13 per cent of Americans had never heard of climate change.

It didn't say whether 12.999 per cent of Americans live in caves.

From the BBC:

China is failing to make progress on improving and protecting the environment, according to a new Chinese government report.

The research ranks China among the world's worst nations - a position unchanged since 2004.

After the US, China produces the most greenhouse gases in the world.

The Chinese report, prepared by academics and government experts, ranked the country 100th out of 118 countries surveyed.

Some 30 indicators were used to measure the level of "ecological modernisation" including carbon dioxide emissions, sewage disposal rates and the safety of drinking water.

Seems like only yesterday that Europe was full of brave talk about a low-carbon future (well, 18 days ago, anyways).

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This NYT story looks at the corporati at Davos are discussing how Europe is considering giving nuclear power a second look.

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BBC Online business editor Tim Weber with his take on the bouyant enthusiasm for the climate change issue among the business elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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Political tea-leaf readers are still a-twitter over the fact that Dubya mentioned climate change in Tuesday's State of the Union speech.

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Andrew Coulson, editor of the News of the World, has resigned after his royals reporter and a private investigator were jailed for intercepting more than 600 messages for senior officials in the royal household.

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Giant mirrors in space. Filling the atmosphere with reflective dust. The United States wants scientists to develop ways to reflect sunlight back into space, and they want that strategy included in next week's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, says the Guardian.

It brings new meaning to the phrase "smoke and mirrors." :)

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A school district in Federal Way, Wash., got into hot water after putting a moratorium on the screening of the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth, which has been nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. Here's why one parent opposed its screening.

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In a commentary for the BBC, Mike Hulme -- director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research -- said the reality of climate change is bad enough without resorting to apocalyptic language.

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Some climate scientists who believe that human-caused global warming is happening also believe that Sir Nicholas Stern's analysis of the economics of climate change made some major errors.

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A round-up of coverage.

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Officials in the former Soviet republic of Georgia grabbed a guy last year who had bomb-grade uranium he was trying to sell (more to the point, he had a sample in his shirt pocket). But he claimed to have up to three kilograms, which is enough for a small nuke.

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The Observer reported that Bush administration was heading for a u-turn on climate change and that he would announce a cap on emissions in his State of the Union Speech on Tuesday.

That was wishful thinking on the part of the Blair government in Britain.

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Here's the Beeb's lede on the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Climate change, the rise of Asia and the next web revolution will dominate the agenda when the World Economic Forum starts on Wednesday in Davos.

And here's a brief excerpt from the Beeb story on the World Social Forum, which opened in Kenya on Jan. 20:

Set up in 2001 as a rival to the World Economic Forum, the forum will cover HIV/Aids, the landless and migration.

It will also emphasise the struggles faced by deprived Africans.