Brazil's dam fish cultivation

Brazil's taking a bad idea and teaching it to swim.

As I mentioned not long ago, dam reservoirs are really nasty things to create but once you have them in place they provide enormous advantages for advancing alternative energy. Now Congress is proposing that dam operators find another way to take advantage of them -- raising fish. And not just any fish. We're talking about non-native species like carp and tilapia.

Belo Monte nearly bankrupts the OAS?

Interesting tidbit pops up in this week’s edition of Semana, Colombia’s premier news magazine. The Organization of American States came close to running out of cash at the end of last year, with December’s paychecks hanging delicately in limbo as the agency struggled to with a growing deficit. Finally OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza managed to scrape together $3.5 billion that kept the group afloat.