Links: May 25, 2012

Back to blogging after a long long time. Here are some highlights of stuff I’ve been reading today:

The Poverty of Nations (Counterpunch), on Adam Smith’s magnum opus turned upside-down in today’s world 

Athina Tsangari reviews Brooklyn Castle, a middle school in Central Brooklyn with a large (and rather successful) Chess programme

From Marginal Revolution, why is re-building Haiti taking so long?

Building on CJ’s post on old-is-gold computer games, here is one awesome repository!

Oil Wars on the horizon (Counterpunch). I’ll probably deal with some of this in longer posts subsequently.

Alstom Foundation announces 90,000 euro grant to Husk Power Systems (The Hindu). HPS is a rather nifty concept aimed at villages deemed “economically unviable” to reach via conventional electricity transmission mechanisms

“Healthy” elephant populations in the four Southern states (The Hindu). I noticed the “indirect evidence” bit in particular, having seen it used in tiger counts in 2006 – and having closely followed the rather embarassing series of events that followed, culminating in the shutting down of Project Tiger

Good news from Ranthambore – its raining litters! (The Hindu)

The start of a new resource war? Oil discoveries in Kenya’s Turkana Basin could lead to a situation not unlike that in the Niger Delta, if current attitudes persist (Project Syndicate)