Former President Bill Clinton, who has pledged his philanthropic weight to help a storm ravaged Haiti, has been named a special envoy to the Caribbean nation on behalf of the United Nations. The appointment comes two months after Clinton visited Haiti alongside U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in an effort to raise global attention to the country's halting efforts to rebuild following a string of storms that wreaked havoc on the Haitian economy, its nine million citizens and its already fragile landscape. Last summer's two hurricanes and two tropical storms in less than 30 days left nearly 800 dead and nearly $1 billion in damage in an impoverished Haiti. They came five months after rising global fuel and food prices triggered days of deadly food riots. The U.N. currently has no special envoy for Haiti, and it is expected that Clinton will travel there at least four times a year as part of the UN's effort to build on the momentum created by his March visit. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/haiti/story/1054866.html

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a San Francisco case May 18 that AT&T and other employers can pay lower retirement benefits to women who took pregnancy leave before Congress changed the nation's anti-discrimination laws in 1979 than they pay to co-workers who went out on disability during the same period. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/18/BUSQ17MMBK.DTL

Cuba's Undersea Oil Could Help Thaw Trade With U.S. by Nick Miroff: "Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, an end to the 1962 U.S. trade embargo against Cuba may be lying untapped, buried under layers of rock, seawater and bitter relations. Oil, up to 20 billion barrels of it, sits off Cuba's northwest coast in territorial waters, according to the Cuban government--enough to turn the island into the Qatar of the Caribbean. At a minimum, estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey place Cuba's potential deep-water reserves at 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, stores that would rank the island among the region's top producers."

The Global Food Crisis, The End of Plenty by Joel K. Bourne Jr.
It is the simplest, most natural of acts, akin to breathing and walking upright. We sit down at the dinner table, pick up a fork, and take a juicy bite, obliv¬ious to the double helping of global ramifications on our plate. Our beef comes from Iowa, fed by Nebraska corn. Our grapes come from Chile, our bananas from Honduras, our olive oil from Sicily, our apple juice—not from Washington State but all the way from China. Modern society has relieved us of the burden of growing, harvesting, even preparing our daily bread, in exchange for the burden of simply paying for it. Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world's farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that's not going away anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record."

Easter Island, in the relative far east of the Pacific Ocean, 2,360 miles from South America, was one of the very last places to be settled by Polynesians. People arrived around the year 500, and after several generations the population was sufficient to get into the labor-intensive monument business. Polynesians were carvers anyway; here they had the perfect volcanic rock for it and little else to occupy their time. So statue building became the central activity of Easter's society. Archaeologists have inventoried 887 carved figures made between about A.D. 1000 and 1600. These big busts, called moai, are an average of 13 feet tall and are known to islanders as the "living faces." In or around 1680, civil war broke out. People began tearing down the statues, possibly in deliberate effrontery to leaders they believed had failed them. (A 33-foot tall statue named Paro, dating from about 1620, was one of the last erected and one of the last felled.) The year 1838 offers the last European mention of a standing statue, and in 1868 every moai on Easter Island was either toppled in the dirt or resting stillborn in the quarry. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242685832325213.html

brachiate (verb: BRAY-kee-ayt, BRAK-ee-ayt, adjective: BRAY-kee-it, BRAK-ee-it)
verb intr.: to move by swinging from one hold to another by using arms
adjective: having arms
From Latin brachiatus (having arms), from brachium (arm), from Greek brakhion (upper arm). Ultimately from the Indo-European root mregh-u- (short) that is also the source of brief, abbreviate, abridge, brassiere, and brumal. A.Word.A.Day

Art you can eat in Kyoto
The meal at famed Kikunoi restaurant was cutting-edge: 12 courses made up of 60 different items, each fanatically sourced using the freshest and highest-quality ingredients available. And in the trendiest fashion, the entire meal, which stretched to almost three hours, weighed in at less than 1,000 calories. Welcome to kaiseki (kye-SEK-ee), the original fixed-price tasting menu, whose roots in Kyoto go back almost 500 years to the Japanese tea ceremony's origins and the practices of meat-shunning Buddhist monks. Derek Wilcox, a 32-year-old American, has worked in Kikunoi's kitchen for two years at no pay to learn how kaiseki is properly done. His hours--7 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week--are grueling. He plans to open a kaiseki restaurant in the U.S. in seven to 10 years--the amount of time he figures he'll need to learn all the principles and techniques. Kaiseki's elaborate style dates back to the 16th century and the tea master Sen no Rikyu, who thought the powdered green tea used in the tea ceremony was too intense to be sipped on an empty stomach. He started serving small plates of food to make drinking the tea more enjoyable. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124242719429025155.html