While You Were Sleeping

The gist of what you may have missed.

by Brian K. Mahoney, February 25, 2009

An early February snowstorm in Britain brought out the latest iteration of so-called “cleanvertising.” Curb, a British advertising agency that specializes in low-impact branding—cutting logos into turf (Addidas), building branded sand sculptures (Volswagen)—added a new medium to their offerings: snow tagging (pictured above). Curb employees, armed with laser-cut stencils of the sports and lifestyle channel Extreme took to the streets of London and left 3,500 imprints of the Extreme logo on parked cars, post boxes, walls, and other snow-covered surfaces.
Source: Utne Reader

The world’s largest publicly traded oil company, Exxon Mobil, posted the most profitable year ever by an American corporation in 2008, despite the collapse oil prices in the fourth quarter of last year. Exxon Mobil earned $45.2 billion in 2008, beating its record-setting 2007 profit if $40.6.
Source: New York Times

As of one of his first acts as interior secretary, Ken Salazar scrapped a Bush administration proposal to open up as many as 300 million acres off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling. Salazar said he was launching a comprehensive review of offshore resources by the Interior Department, which oversees oil and gas drilling on public lands, including 1.7 billion acres on the outer continental shelf. He also promised to conduct four meetings with stakeholders in Alaska, on the Pacific Coast, the Atlantic Coast, and the Gulf Coast before making a final decision on offshore drilling. President Bush’s draft proposal, which would govern drilling on the outer continental shelf from 2010 to 2015, was unveiled just days before Bush left the White House.

Salazar said the delay represented a “dramatic change from the last eight years, where you had a one-road highway to energy independence, which was drill, drill, drill.”

In a similar move, Salazar has reversed another Bush-era plan to lease wilderness land in Utah “at the doorstep of some of nation’s most treasured landscapes,” according to Salazar— Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Parks, Dinosaur National Monument and Nine Mile Canyon
Source: Houston Chronicle, Agene France Presse

In late January 85 children were released by the Mai-Mai armed group in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The children were between the ages of 7 and 17, five of them being girls, and many of them are believed to have been conscripted by the Mai-Mai as child soldiers into the ongoing conflict in the border region of Rwanda and Congo, the world’s deadliest battleground since World War II, killing 5.4 million people in the last 10 years. A number of armed groups in North Kivu, including the National Congress for People’s Defense, Pareco, and the Mai-Mai, have verbally agreed to release all children in their ranks. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers estimates that tens of thousands of children are currently fighting in 19 conflicts across the globe.
Sources: UNICEF, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers