Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage!

• Algal bloom kills 240 of Florida’s 5000 manatees (cause of death: natural toxin)
• Madonna smacked down by Malawi government after her recent visit
• Shale gas and methane leaks, greener than coal but by how much?
• Obama tells donors that the politics of the environment are hard, hints at what he might do on Keystone XL pipeline
• BP is beyond “Beyond Petroleum,” sells wind power interests
• Nicholas Lemann asks: what happened to the environmental movement?

• New bird flu cases from China: how worried should we be?
• Tom Bollyky: Why does Gleevec, a leukemia drug that costs $70,000 per year in the United States, cost just $2,500 in India?
• Obama budget proposes buying about half of food aid locally in affected countries and regions rather than from American farmers, a big shift
• American Al-Shabaab and his curious relationship with counter-terrorism community
• GDELT event dataset is out, publicly available, and may revolutionize quantitative conflict studies (some discussion of its origins from Will Moore)
• One of my SXSW finds, The Lone Bellow, at one of NPR’s final Tiny Desk Concerts before the move to a new building