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Media Bits & Bytes - It's Elementary edition

Portside
Seattle pauses surveillance plans; Journalists on the move; Google wins book-scanning decision; Supercomputer Watson for all; Writers persecuted for digital media use; Google bigger than print industries.

Big Pharma

The Strip By Brian McFadden New York Times

Surviving Climate Change

Michael T. Klare Tom Dispatch
With an awareness of climate change growing and as intensifying floods, fires, droughts, and storms become an inescapable feature of daily life across the planet, more people are joining environmental groups and engaging in increasingly bold protest actions. Sooner or later, government leaders are likely to face multiple eruptions of mass public anger and may, in the end, be forced to make radical adjustments in energy policy or risk being swept aside.

Why the Boeing machinists' fight matters

Ari Paul Aljazeera America
Boeing's fight against its machinists raises a terrifying possibility about U.S. capitalism. It appears that instead of industrial growth translating into national prosperity, the United States is beginning to conform to what economists call the Iron Law of Wages, which says the natural price of labor is subsistence. The only reasonable pay for workers, the theory goes, is enough to sustain them to live and work to produce value for their bosses and nothing more.