News from the high seas, from the eastern front, and from over the hills and far away

In the short term, the prospect of famine looms throughout much of what was once called the Third World. The United Nations' Jean Ziegler, puts it this way: "This is silent mass murder. We have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror. We have to put a stop to this."

In the long term, more food is going to have to come from the sea. That may sound strange, given the way the world's fishing fleets are ravaging the oceans, but it's true, it's achievable, and Taras Grescoe makes the case well, as I argue in today's Globe and Mail.

Grescoe is a fine writer, and he's written a terrific book. Read it alongside this book and you'll know all you need to know about the subject.

If you think the threat of global famine is unrelated to the challenges posed by jihadism, obscurantism and tyranny, you need to get out more. It's one struggle, with many fronts, and a particularly strategic front we need to hold is the one that traverses Afghanistan, as my colleagues Lauryn Oates, Jonathon Narvey and Karim Qayumi make plain in today's National Post. Jonathon's take on it is here.

Nice to see the stoppiste position properly identified as the reactionary pose that it truly is; you don't often see that happen in the mainstream press. Good for Brian Hutchinson, who knows a thing or two about the subject.

Meanwhile, there's a very friendly half-page review of my latest, The Lost and Left Behind, "a thoughtful and engaging book about how the future of the entire biosphere depends on the whims of one species," in this week's Times Literary Supplement. But it's not online. So you'll have to trust me.

And while I'm being vain, the brilliant Norm Geras, author of Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, and Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind, and several other such invaluable works, has put up a "profile" of yours truly over at his web lodge.

I'm quite serious about Plan 9 From Outer Space. Here are some of the best bits: