Sunday Round Up – #6

Top Stories

The WTO’s Doha Round of trade talks appears to be close to collapse.  The good thing is that an agreement to ban bad fishing subsidies may be carved out of it.

A new analysis has found that the world’s major economies have taken important legal strides to curb carbon emissions in the past 18 months.  Thus, while the UN flounders, leading powers have taken concrete steps.  (Of course, we don’t know the impact of these laws yet.)  Richard Black explores this further.

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Worth Reading/Watching

Australian Geographic has a great piece on the state of our oceans.  It reviews the work of Dr. Ben Halpern, who published a map of human impacts on the oceans several years ago.  That work showed that just 4% of the world’s oceans are now entirely undamaged by human activity. Climate change, fishing, pollution, and other human factors have taken their toll in some way on all the other 96% of the world’s oceans.

Here’s a good NYT Op-Ed on the “flag of convenience” system.

Foreign Policy Magazine shows (w infographics) what the leading experts think about the future of our food system.

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Good Stuff

Spectacular x-ray photo of a sting ray (hat tip Deep Sea News).

Ten things you can learn from the sea.

A photo of a 55 ft fish washed ashore in China.

There are 657 more islands than we previously thought.

Beautiful video showing how Mexico’s underwater sculpture garden was created (that part begins at 3:40).