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An independent view of the world
seen from Pacific Tokelau
The Independent New York Times
Pacific,
June, 2010 - News
Magazine's Summary of
News - Editor
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sumpinein@gmail.com
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CHINESE WORKERS DEMAND GREATER SHARE OF WEALTH |
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(Reuters) - The labour
unrest that began among foreign firms in south
China's Pearl Delta area is showing signs of spreading
to poorer interior regions, as a new generation of
workers seek a bigger portion of the nation's growing
wealth.
The burst of reported strikes is a
worry for China's ruling Communist Party, which has long
discouraged independent worker action and punished
protesters. While Beijing has made vows of better
incomes for workers and farmers a cornerstone of policy,
local officials are often focused on attracting
investors with cheap, trouble-free labour to fuel
China's export boom. Following recent high-profile
disputes at Honda Motor and iPhone maker Foxconn
International, strikes were reported at a
Taiwanese-owned sports goods supplier in Jiangxi
province, and at
Japanese
sewing machine maker Brother Industries in Xian -- both
some distance from China's wealthier regions near Hong
Kong and Shanghai. "All it takes now is a single spark
and news will spread all over China, which could lead to
similar industrial action in other factories," said Paul
Tang, chief economist at Bank of East Asia in Hong Kong.
Reports of
the poor working conditions first began to surface last
month when Chinese and later foreign media began
detailing a string of suicides at a massive south China
compound run by Foxconn, a unit of Taiwan electronics
giant Hon Hai. Subsequent outbreaks of labour unrest
have not been as widely reported in local media,
possibly reflecting official reluctance to spread word
of the disputes. |
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CAMERON & AUSTERITY |
AS
PARIS AND BERLIN BICKER... |
EX-TRADER GOES ON TRIAL |
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LONDON — Prime Minister
David Cameron
said that
Britain’s
financial situation was “even worse than we thought” and
that savage spending cuts were needed to bring the
deficit under control. Stern and grim-faced Mr. Cameron
said, “The decisions we make will affect every single
person in our country,” he said. “And the effects of
those decisions will stay with us for years, perhaps
decades, to come.” |
BRUSSELS — A
deal was struck Monday to establish a 440
billion-euro safety net for debt-laden countries in
the euro
zone, a move that officials hope will calm the markets
that have helped prompt a slide in the value of the
euro. For several weeks, there has been uncertainty
about the technicalities of a large-scale rescue plan,
worth a total of 750 billion euros, or $896 billion,
announced on May 10 as the crisis over sovereign debt
gathered pace. |
PARIS
- Former trader Jerome
Kerviel goes on trial Tuesday accused of
unauthorised deals that cost French bank Societe
Generale five billion euros.
His lawyers will argue
that he is the victim, not the culprit, in the huge
trade, the unwinding of which rocked stock markets at
the time.
Kerviel, 33, is charged
with abuse of trust, falsifying documents and hacking
into bank computers. |
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IN THE MOOD FOR
LOVE |
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CHINESE DRINK |
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OIL
FLOW TO LAST MONTHS |
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| Gulf of
Mexico - The fight to cut off the flow of
oil feeding the giant oil slick in the Gulf of
Mexico could take three months, BP said today.
The oil giant launched a new front in its battle
to contain the spill, as engineers began
drilling a relief well designed to cut off the
leaking oil permanently. The new well, which is
in 5,000 feet of water, is planned to intercept
the existing well at 13,000 feet — about two
miles — below the seabed. It will be used to
inject cement to cap the one that is leaking.
Drilling began on Sunday at 3pm local time,
after days of delays caused by poor weather
conditions. However, BP confirmed that the
operation would take “some three months” to
complete. |
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ANGLO IRISH BANK
CHAIRMAN ARRESTED |
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Dublin - Irish police yesterday arrested Sean
FitzPatrick, the former chairman of Anglo Irish
Bank. Mr FitzPatrick,
a high-profile emblem of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger
boom years, is the first to have been arrested.
The Irish Independent predicted that Anglo’s
pre-tax loss for the 15 months to the end of
December could be as high as €12 billion — more
than Ireland collects in income tax annually.
The regulator has also been investigating
whether Anglo Irish used more than €7 billion of
short-term deposits from Irish Life & Permanent
to mask large customer deposit withdrawals.
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VOTE FOR
EXTINCTION |
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| Qatar -
Proposals to ban trade in bluefin tuna and
polar bears were overwhelmingly rejected
yesterday at the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), meeting in
Doha, Qatar. Feelings were running high
yesterday about the failure of measures to
protect endangered tuna. Only 20 of the 120
countries at the meeting voted to ban trade in
the bluefin. Intensive lobbying by Japan, which
consumes 80 per cent of Atlantic and
Mediterranean bluefin, meant that a snap vote
was held before any debate on scientific reports
that show a catastrophic decline in the largest
of the tuna family. |
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ALICE IN
WONDERLAND |
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| New York
Times Review - Tim Burton has done his best
work with contemporary stories, so it’s curious
if not curiouser that he’s turned his sights on
another 19th-century tale. Perhaps after
slitting all those throats in his adaptation of
“Sweeney Todd,”
he thought he would chop off a few heads.
Whatever his inspiration, he has tackled this
new story with his customary mix of torpor and
frenzy. After a short glance back at Alice’s
childhood and an equally brief look at her
present, he sends the 19-year-old on her way,
first down the hole and then into a dreamscape —
unfortunately tricked out with 3-D that
distracts more than it delights — where she
meets a grinning cat and a lugubrious
caterpillar, among other fantastical creatures.
Dark and sometimes grim, this isn’t your
great-grandmother’s Alice or that of Uncle Walt,
who was disappointed with the 1951 Disney
version of “Alice in Wonderland.” “Alice has no
character,” said a writer who worked on that
project. “She merely plays straight man to a
cast of screwball comics.” Of course the
character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident
in each outrageous creation she dreams up in
“Wonderland”
and in the sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,”
which means that she’s a straight man to her own
imagination. (She is
Wonderland.) Here she mostly serves as a foil
for the top biller
Johnny Depp,
who (yes, yes) plays the Mad Hatter, and Mr.
Burton’s bright and leaden whimsies. |
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THE FINANCIAL
CRISIS NOVEL |
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International critics acclaim this novel of
the financial crisis, the story of Irish bankers
and City financiers in the worst financial
crisis since the crash of 1929. Contact our
literary critic at
sumpinein@gmail.com |
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PUU OO
ERUPTS |
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| Stunning
video shots show the lava has reached just
behind the rim in one section, coinciding with
Volcano Awareness Month in Hawaii. |
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COMMENT |
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| A sign of the
times. A modern folly or vision? The world's
tallest building built on petro-dollars and
speculation. |
| The leaders
of 192 countries met under the aegis of the
United Nations to come to an agreement to combat
climate change. Whether we are believers or not
this meeting has shown the incapacity of world
leaders to come to a meaningful agreement and
the futility of such conferences in the face of
individual nations own priorities. The USA and
China, the world's leading emitters of CO2,
whilst showing they are the two most powerful
nations on the planet, ignored the rest of the
world. At the same time China showed its true
face, arrogant and easily offended. What is
evident to every human being is that our world
is becoming more and more polluted with each
passing day and our leaders...and scientists are
incapable of finding a common ground to save us
from the fate we are preparing for future
generations. |
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SOME
AVOIDED BEING TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS |
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EAT YOUR DOG! |
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Owners should consider doing
without, downsizing or even eating their pets to
help save the planet. A medium-sized
dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser
driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is
equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf. But rabbits and
chickens are eco-friendly because they provide
meat for their owners while a canary or a
goldfish has little effect on the environment.
At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same
damage as running a plasma television, suggests
the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to
Sustainable Living. New Zealand-based authors
Robert and Brenda Vale base their findings on
the amount of land needed to grow food for pets
ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs. They
say an average Collie eats 164kg of meat and
95kg of cereals a year, giving it a high impact
on the planet. But a pair of rabbits can produce
36 young annually, which would provide 72kg of
meat and help decrease the owner's carbon
footprint. |
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AMADINEJAD
JEWISH? |
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| A photograph of the
Iranian president holding up his identity card
during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his
family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the
document reveals he was previously known as
Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his
family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they
converted to embrace Islam after his birth. The
Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr
Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives
from the Jewish for "weaver of the Sabour", the
name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The
name is even on the list of reserved names for
Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the
Interior. Experts last night suggested Mr
Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled
attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to
hide his past. Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for
Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of
Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about
him. "Every family that converts into a
different religion takes a new identity by
condemning their old faith. "By making
anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any
suspicions about his Jewish connections. He
feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society." A
London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian"
ending to the name specifically showed the
family had been practising Jews. "He has changed
his name for religious reasons, or at least his
parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living
in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name
in Iran." A spokesman for the Iranian embassy in
London said it would not be drawn on Mr
Ahmadinejad's background. "It's not something
we'd talk about," said Ron Gidor, a spokesman.
The Iranian leader has not denied his name was
changed when his family moved to Tehran in the
1950s. But he has never revealed what it was
change from or directly addressed the reason for
the switch. |
| PEACE HOPE
FADES |
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| JERUSALEM - A
frantic effort by the US Middle East envoy
to wrest an agreement that would restart peace
talks appeared to have ended in failure
yesterday, inflicting President Obama’s first
important foreign policy setback. George
Mitchell shuttled between Jerusalem and the West
Bank attempting to wrest an agreement on
settlement building before the UN General
Assembly meeting next week. US officials had
hoped that Israeli and Palestinian leaders would
meet on the sidelines of the assembly,
kick-starting peace negotiations that have been
stalled for nearly nine months. But a
spokesperson for the State Department told
reporters, “There has been no agreement to have
the trilateral meeting . Of course we were
hoping for a breakthrough.” It appeared that
Israeli and Palestinian leaders remained at odds
over several key issues, most notably Israel’s
West Bank settlements. Mr Mitchell was said to
be pushing Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime
Minister, for a year-long freeze but an Israeli
official said that this “was not an option”.
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KIM JONG IL
DYING |
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| North
Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Il, is
suffering from cancer of the pancreas and is in
danger of dying of the disease, South Korean
television reported this morning, the latest and
most specific in a series of reports on the
dictator’s health. The information, which was
attributed by Yonhap Television News to
unidentified Chinese and South Korean
intelligence sources, is consistent with a
report in a Japanese newspaper over the weekend
that Mr Kim has a “serious pancreatic disorder”,
and with television images from North Korea last
week, in which he appeared haggard, emaciated
and slow on his feet. |
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BANKSY
EXHIBITION |
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Graffiti artist Banksy has pulled off an
audacious stunt amid tight secrecy to stage his
biggest ever exhibition. A burned-out
ice-cream van is among 100 works Banksy has
installed at Bristol's museum, replacing many of
the museum's regular artefacts. The reason the
museum was closed was kept secret from top
council officials. Banksy said: "This is the
first show I've ever done where taxpayers' money
is being used to hang my pictures up rather than
scrape them off." Staged in the council-owned
City Museum and Art Gallery, Banksy v Bristol
Museum features animatronics, installations and
a sensory display. "This show is my vision of
the future, to which many people will say: 'You
should have gone to Specsavers'", Banksy added.
The exhibition and its location have been a
closely-guarded secret since October, with just
a couple of museum officials in the loop. "I
think we may have dragged them down to our level
rather than being elevated to theirs," said
Banksy of the subterfuge involved in staging the
show in his home city. The artist himself was
involved in setting up the exhibits and came to
the museum to oversee its installation, but
staff were unaware who he was among the crew
setting up the show. He became famous after a
series of "guerrilla" stunts which saw him paint
the West Bank barrier and put an inflatable
figure of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner at Disney
World. |
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GORILLA WARFARE |
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| Officially, monkeys,
apes and protected species shouldn’t be sold in
the Republic of Congo. Since years of civil war
finally ended in 2003, the government has been
trying to work with conservation organisations
and NGOs to try to lure tourists in to their
three National Parks and scattering of reserves,
and so has tried to ban the sale of endangered
bush meat. But it isn’t an easy task.
Congo-Brazzaville might be the fourth biggest
producer of oil in Africa, but corruption is
endemic, leaving its population of three million
poor and its infrastructure crumbling. Roads
sport potholes the size – and sometimes the
depth – of pool tables. There are few jobs. The
west of the country is overrun with opposition
militia called Ninjas, who have almost brought
the railway, and so trade, through the western
port of Pointe-Noire, to a halt. Even
electricity is in short supply; when we sit
having dinner in Brazzaville, the lights go out
several times – apparently because the only
supply now comes from the country’s even more
troubled neighbour, the Democratic Republic of
Congo. Besides, for centuries the people of
Africa have eaten bush meat: the flesh of wild
creatures who have fed on rich natural forests
which, I’m assured, is delicious. To tell
Congolese they can’t hunt, or have to buy (with
money many don’t have) thin chickens and
tasteless pork when there are delicious forest
creatures to eat is extremely difficult. Which
is why, in the stalls of Brazzaville’s main
market, there are few creatures that I can’t
buy. On a small scrubbed table, a three-foot
live crocodile lies miserably, its legs and long
nose tied with raffia to prevent it moving.
Turtles keep trying to flip themselves (to the
stallholder’s annoyance) from their shell onto
their feet. Butchers’ blocks are neatly piled
with cubes of smoked eland, wild boar, and whole
monkey carcases. And in the traditional medicine
section – hanging with feathers, beads, leaves,
flowers, bundles of bark, the soles of
elephants’ feet, jars of eyes, mammal foetuses,
birds' heads and little vials of cobra venom – I
am offered the very thing I hoped not to find:
gorilla bones. Current estimates for gorilla
populations make for depressing reading. Of the
most populous species – the western lowland
gorilla – there are thought to be about 125,000
left in the world. But at the current rate of
extermination of about 60 per cent in the past
25 years, according to Amos Courage of The
Aspinall Foundation, which is working with the
Congolese government to protect the species. “We
will be lucky if we have half of that left by
2020. And even fewer mountain gorillas,” he
says. Last year, he says, four gorillas were
intercepted en route from Cameroon to a zoo in
Malaysia – which had paid $1,600,000 (£1million)
for the primates. |
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SRI LANKA
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS |
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Thousands of civilians are trapped as Asia’s
longest-running civil war neared its endgame
amid scenes of “unimaginable humanitarian
catastrophe”. Trapped in trenches, with little
food and water, up to 50,000 ethnic Tamils are
pinned in a tiny pocket of land between the
final advance of the Sri Lankan Army and the
Tamil Tiger rebels facing imminent defeat. A
government doctor in the area said hundreds of
wounded civilians, many of them dying from their
injuries, had crowded into a makeshift hospital
that he was forced to abandon two days ago
because of shelling. “They are dying without
proper treatment,” said Thurairajah Varatharajah.
“Dead bodies are all lying on the floor. We are
unable to bury or clear them. It is a very
pathetic situation.” He said: “We are in fear
not just for my life, but for all the civilians
and patients and staff. Here there is no food,
no water, nothing.” Thileepan Parthipan, a
spokesman for the Tigers, said: “People are
dying every minute. The situation is critical.”
The final push to end the Indian Ocean island’s
26-year civil war comes in defiance of repeated
appeals for a ceasefire from most
Western governments. About 7,000 civilians have
been killed since late January, according to the
United Nations, which has called for an
independent war crimes inquiry to examine the
behaviour of both sides. The International
Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral
organisation working in the conflict area, said
its staff were “witnessing an unimaginable
humanitarian catastrophe”. The army said 10,000
desperate civilians fled the area yesterday.
They risked being shot by both sides, but in the
past few days have paddled across a lagoon on
rubber tyres, or waded through its chest high
waters to the relative safety of army lines.
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TARANTINO
TAKES ON HITLER |
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| To say it's
a revisionist view of the second world
war is understating it, but when
Quentin Tarantino
takes on Hitler and the Nazis, there is
never any real doubt about who is going
to win.Tarantino today unveiled
Inglourious
Basterds
at the
Cannes film
festival,
starring
Brad Pitt
as the leader of a troop of Nazi-killing
Jewish-American soldiers in occupied
France.Pitt admitted the film was
"definitely outrageous" and recalled
Tarantino's visit to his French home
last summer to pitch it. "All I know is
we talked about backstory and we talked
about movies into the wee hours. I got
up the next morning and I saw five empty
bottles of wine on the floor. Five. And
something that resembled smoking
apparatus, I don't know what that was.
"Apparently I had agreed to do the movie
and six weeks later I was in a uniform."
Tarantino said he had wanted to create a
character for Pitt for a long time.
"Artistically, me and Brad have been
sniffing around each other for a while.
"The longing looks across the room, the
little notes, 'I like you, do you like
me.' Pretty quickly into writing I
realised this is the one for Brad and
then I started getting nervous – 'shit,
if he doesn't do it, what the fuck am I
going to do?'" Tarantino wrote
Inglourious Basterds for 10 years on and
off and it was financed and filmed, by
normal movie standards, remarkably
quickly in order to be ready for this
year's festival. It is a kind of
spaghetti western-comedy-fairy tale
where the characters revel in
violence.Asked if it was fair to call it
a Jewish revenge fantasy, Tarantino
said: "That wouldn't be how I would
define it 100%. You could definitely say
that and it works completely in that
way. That wouldn't be the section in the
video store I would maybe put it in.
"People ask me, is it a fairy tale? Is
it Jewish wish-fulfilment fantasy? There
are aspects of that but to me, more than
anything else, it is that my characters
change the outcome of the war. Now that
didn't happen because my characters
didn't exist, but if they had existed
then the movie is plausible." The actor
Eli Roth, who plays a baseball
bat-swinging Basterd, was upfront about
how he felt. "Being Jewish, for me it's
like kosher porn. It's something that I
have fantasised about since I was a very
young child. It was like I performed a
sex scene when I beat that guy to
death." |
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BRANAGH AS WALLANDER |
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Ystad,
a Swedish town provides the setting for
Wallander,
a trilogy of 90-minute TV movies
beginning Sunday on PBS' "Masterpiece:
Mystery!" The bodies really pile up
around there, something of a statistical
anomaly when you consider that the
murder rate
in Sweden is a little more than one
homicide per 100,000 citizens per year
and the fact that Ystad has a population
of only about 17,000. It's Hellmouth on
the Baltic. Based on a series of novels
by
Henning Mankell
that have been translated into many
languages and sold many copies around
the world, "Wallander" stars
Kenneth Branagh
as the eponymous police detective, and
it's good to see him. Apart from his
Shakespeare adaptations, and even
including some of them, Branagh's career
choices have not always been
commensurate with his talent as an
actor. But if he's no longer a golden
boy, there's something about him as he
creeps up on 50 that's even more
appealing, and he makes a neat fit for
the gone-to-seed, world-weary Wallander,
who no longer knows why he does what he
does but works even harder at it to
avoid dealing with his inability to sort
out his own life. I recommend the
series, though Sunday's opening film,
"Sidetracked," does present a bit of a
stumbling block. It is stylized to a
fault, a riot of saturated color,
reflections, distortions, and arty
shallow focus that might work for the
length of a music video or
pharmaceuticals ad, but is distracting
and distancing across the course of a
feature film. There was possibly some
intent to contrast the darkness of the
stories with the beauty of the location
-- the first thing that happens here is
that a girl sets herself on fire in a
gorgeous field of yellow grain. Even the
police station is a magazine-ready haven
of lovely Scandinavian design. But there
is creating mood and there is showing
off, and "Sidetracked" is so visually
hyper that the players seem to be
overacting even when they're sitting and
staring into space -- and there is quite
a lot of that, as Wallander is rendered
speechless by the
unravelling of the
Swedish social order. |
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ANGELS AND DEMONS |
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| ROME
(Reuters) - After exposing a Church
cover-up in "The Da Vinci Code,"
symbologist Robert Langdon returns to
the big screen as an unlikely
Vatican ally in the latest movie
adaptation of a novel by author Dan
Brown. "Angels & Demons," again starring
Tom Hanks as Langdon and directed by Ron
Howard, premieres in Rome Monday at a
theater a mile away from Vatican City.
In the film, Langdon is recruited by the
Vatican after the pope dies and four
cardinals who are favorites to succeed
him are kidnapped. Langdon races through
the "Eternal City" deciphering clues
linked to a centuries-old secret
society, the Illuminati. "He is not the
man the Vatican trusts -- he is the man
the Vatican needs," Howard said in
production notes for the movie. Ewan
McGregor plays the central role of the "Camerlengo,"
or chamberlain, who runs the Vatican
between the time of the pope's death and
the election of his successor. "He sees
himself as a man who will do whatever it
takes to save the Church from the
Illuminati and everything they
represent," McGregor said. Angels &
Demons has so far avoided the kind of
broadside the Vatican aimed at The Da
Vinci Code film in 2005 and 2006 and the
following year at "The Golden Compass"
starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.
"Dramatizing the issue involuntarily
gives publicity to Angels & Demons,"
said Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, in an
interview with Italy's La Stampa
newspaper. "Be careful not to play their
game." The Da Vinci Code upset the
Vatican and some Catholics because of
its storyline, in which Jesus married
Mary Magdalene and had children,
creating a royal bloodline that Church
officials kept secret for centuries.
Christians are taught that Jesus never
married, was crucified and rose from the
dead. Despite the controversy, and a
critical mauling at the Cannes film
festival where it was launched, The Da
Vinci Code went on to gross more than
$750 million worldwide, supporting the
theory that no publicity is bad
publicity. |
|
TERMINATOR SALVATION |
|
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Terminator Salvation: The Future
Begins (2009)
Starring: Christian Bale, Sam
Worthington, Anton Yelchin, Moon
Bloodgood, Common
Director: McG
U.S. Opening Date: May
22nd, 2009
Terminator Salvation: The Future
Begins will reinvent the cyborg saga
with a storyline to be told over a
three-movie span. The film is set in the
future, in a full-scale war between
Skynet and humankind. On January 6th
2008, producer John Middleton had the
following to say about the movie: "It's
post-apocalyptic. It's set after the
events of [Terminator 3: Rise Of The
Machines], where we see the nuclear
exchange at the end of the movie, and we
show what the world is like after this
event, and we show how people try to
deal in a post-apocalyptic world. And we
introduce a new character, who becomes
very important to the resistance and to
John Connor, a new hero. It's really
about the birth of a new hero." About
John Conner, he said: "I would look at
him as a character that is introduced
and that will grow in the second and
third movies of the trilogy." On Arnold
Schwarzenegger's involvement in the
film: "He has been approached, and in
the early days of our development of
T4, one of our producers, Andy Vajna,
who's a good friend of his, spoke to him
about doing a cameo. This was even
before he was governor. But we know now
that he is governor, he's got priorities
that are above doing movies." |
Subscribe to the
Independent New York Times
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STAR TREK RETURNS |
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THE TIMES -
The salute “live long and prosper” is
the Vulcan equivalent of “shalom”,
accompanied by a raised palm parted into
a “V” between the second and third
fingers. It neatly sums up the
flourishing and seemingly never-ending
story of Star Trek, whose
original brief — literally, its mission
statement — was to boldly go where no
man had gone before, and, 726 episodes
of five overlapping, live-action TV
series, one animated series, 11 feature
films and innumerable novels later, is
still doing just that. The $150 million
new movie — the very definition of what
Hollywood calls a “tent pole picture”
(that is, it is expected to carry the
weight of commercial expectation for an
entire media conglomerate) — docks in at
your local multiplex next week. Its
young cast, including our own Simon Pegg,
are hailed as superstars. Blog and
broadsheet alike have been falling over
themselves to be the first with a rave
review since it was first shown. Famous
fans such as Jonathan Ross, Quentin
Tarantino and even the leader of the
free world himself line up to express
their Starfleet-like
allegiance. But
hang on. This is Star Trek,
right? The tinpot space opera from,
like, the Sixties, with the bad actors
and the wobbly sets and the portentous
ideas above its station? The one that
was cancelled by its own network after
three seasons in 1969 and relaunched as
a movie franchise ten years later only
by applying some sturdy corsets to its
ageing cast and capitalising on the
success of the much more exciting
Star Wars? The Star Trek
beloved only of sexless academics and
sad white suburban males with few social
skills and poor hygiene, tramping off to
endless conventions dressed as Klingons
and Romulans? Well, yes. It’s a
phenomenon, Jim, but not as we know it.
By doggedly sticking to its guns over an
astonishing 43 years — or rather,
sticking to its peacenik “phasers”,
which can be set to “stun” as well as
“vaporise” — the starship USS
Enterprise has become politically
relevant again. Its once-radically
multiracial, multispecies crew and its
“prime directive” to explore rather than
conquer “strange new worlds” chimed with
the optimism of the space-race era and
now chimes again, thanks to the election
of Barack Obama, who showed his colours
at an election rally in Wyoming, saying,
“I grew up on Star Trek. I
believe in the final frontier.” Star
Trek steadfastly refuses to reach
that final frontier. But why? What makes
a show about some men and women in space
so enduring? Is it simple escapism, or
something deeper and more profound that
manages to make first contact with each
successive generation? |
|
GODDESS & GENIUS |
 |
|
The Genius and the Goddess:
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe by Jeffrey
Meyers A FEW weeks after she wed Arthur Miller,
Marilyn Monroe was starring opposite Laurence
Olivier in the calamitous The Prince And The
Showgirl. The more Miller, who’d accompanied his
wife to England, saw of Olivier’s
professionalism and dedicated artistry, the more
he began to fear for his wife. For though
Marilyn was at the height of her fame she was
clearly also off her rocker. She couldn’t
remember the shortest lines, turned up five
hours late on set and was the cause of costly
delays. Indifferent generally to what people
thought, the actress was cheerfully aware that
the seething Olivier deemed her “a troublesome
bitch”. Miller was reserved, guarded and
intellectual and voluble, myriad-minded Marilyn
looked up to him as an authority figure.
Consequently he “basked in her unqualified
adoration”, in the words of Jeffrey Meyers, who
in this book picks apart the relationship with
forensic brilliance. It is a story of the tragic
illusions people have about each other and what
happens when the fantasy wears off. Marilyn, we
learn, had always had an unexpected brainy side.
She collected the works of Rainer Maria Rilke
and James Joyce and had real dreams of playing
Grushenka in an adaptation of The Brothers
Karamazov. But Marilyn’s problem was that nobody
wanted her to be anything more than a dumb
blonde with a 36-24-34 figure.
|
|
FRED THE SHRED'S HOME ATTACKED |



|
A group has claimed
responsibility for attacking the
home of former bank boss
Sir Fred Goodwin and warned
"this is just the beginning".
Windows were smashed at the
Edinburgh villa and a car parked
in the driveway was also
damaged. The attack was
caught on CCTV cameras at Sir Fred's
home and the footage was handed to
police, sources said, adding that
officers had arrived within three
minutes. The windows of his Mercedes 600 were
also smashed. Sir Fred, ex-chief
executive of Royal Bank Of Scotland,
was criticised after he was given a
pension worth £700,000 a year, despite
the bank being bailed-out by the
Government. One of Britain's leading
thinkers has told Sky News that the
attack on Sir Fred's home is a "wake up
call" to the people at the very top of
our society. See story below... |
|
|
FRED THE SHRED'S KINGLY PENSION FROM ROYAL BANK OF
SCOTLAND |
 |
| A
Smug Sir
Fred (the Shred)Goodwin, who as head of Royal
Bank of Scotland lost $60
billion. He has now been accused
of misleading the Government
while fighting to keep his
mammoth pension pot of $24
million dollars. His pension is
almost $2000 per day. No wonder
he looks pleased with himself. |
|
SEEN
FROM SPACE |
|
 |
|
SKYDIVER
FORMATION |
 |
| The skydivers leap
from a plane at 13,000ft equipped with wing
suits and fly just inches apart as they reach
speeds of up to 120mph. With smoke cannisters
strapped to their ankles, they perform a
choreographed acrobatic routine to simulate the
real Red Arrows. They wear just a helmet and
specially-designed body suit, which feature
flaps of material between the legs and under the
arms to act as wings. Once they are within
3,000ft of the ground they open one of two
parachutes on their £1,000 suits to land safely.
Mark Harris, who films the jumps, says it is one
of the most "liberating" and "peaceful"
experiences possible. Mr Harris, 35, from
Kettering, Northants, said: "For years sky
divers have been trying various formations
during jumps so this provided a framework for
the jumps.
|
|
'SLUM
DOG' NANO |
 |
| The European version of the TATA
ultra-cheap Nano will be unveiled at the
Geneva Motor Show this week. The eventual retail
price is rumoured to be about €5,000 (£4,400).
Tata has promised to sell the car for 100,000
rupees (£1,400) in India. Launched last year, it
was heralded as a marvel of super-thrifty
engineering that would redefine the auto
industry. Tata executives have since suggested
that the rear-engine, four-door runabout,
designed to tempt India's middle classes away
from their motorbikes and scooters, is now
ideally suited to cash-strapped Western
consumers. |
|

|
Read DEATH OF
A FINANCIER by
JOHN FRANCIS KINSELLA |

|
Tom Barton, a City
mortgage broker, decides
to quit his business in
the wake of the subprime
crisis and arrives in
Kovalam, in the south of
India. In the Maharaja
Palace he finds himself
in the company of
holiday makers from the
UK, Scandinavia and
Russia. Stephen Parkly,
the CEO of a successful
City bank, and his young
wife Emma are taking a
well earned year end
break. Parkly falls
gravely ill with a
mysterious infection,
whilst back in the City,
unknown to him his
mortgage and investment
bank, West Mercian
Finance is in grave
difficulties. Ryan
Kavanagh, a doctor,
comes to Emma’s aid with
the help of Barton,
after an attempted
cover-up by the Indian
authorities, who fear
for their tourist
industry and more
especially medical
tourism, as the disease
threatens the resort
with the tourist season
in full swing. Thousands
of British tourists
enjoying the sun are
unaware of the pending
disaster, many are
equally unaware their
savings about are to be
wiped out in the West
Mercian collapse. |
|
OR PRINT
VERSION
FROM
| More books by John Francis Kinsella from Vincennes Books: Borneo Pulp, The Legacy of Solomon, Offshore Islands, The Lost Forest |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| THE ECONOMIST
- Why do people who work in finance earn more
than most other people? It is a question that
concerns politicians, as they debate reform of
the industry. It ought also to worry those
millions who, as savers and borrowers, are
consumers of the industry’s products.
Something has clearly
changed within the past 40 years. Banking and
asset management used to be perceived as fairly
dull jobs, which did not attract a significant
wage premium. But after 1980, financial wages
started to climb much more quickly than those of
engineers, another profession that ought to have
benefited from technological complexity.
Around the same time,
banks became more profitable. Andrew Smithers of
Smithers & Co, a firm of consultants, points out
that the return on equity achieved by British
banks averaged around 7% between 1921 and 1971;
since then it has averaged around 20%.
Such a sustained rise
suggests that the finance sector has been able
to extract “rents”, a term that economists use
to explain excess profits. But that suggestion
only raises another question; why haven’t those
rents been competed away?
Barriers to entry are a
standard explanation for an uncompetitive
market. In the case of banking, these barriers
may exist in the form of the implicit subsidy
provided by government support; this lowers the
cost of finance for leading institutions. In
March Andrew Haldane, executive director for
financial stability at the Bank of England,
argued that the effective annual subsidy for the
five biggest British banks during the credit
crunch was more than £50 billion ($73 billion),
roughly equal to the whole industry’s annual
profit in the years before the crisis.
As evidence of the
industry’s lack of competition, Mr Smithers
points to its increasing concentration. The
proportion of bank assets held by the three
biggest American banks has tripled since 1994.
It is far from clear that this concentration is
healthy for the rest of the economy; Mr Haldane
cites research showing that economies of scale
peak when banks have $5 billion-10 billion of
assets.
The big banks may have
benefited from other factors apart from a lower
cost of capital. In market-making, for example,
size gives banks an advantage since they have
more knowledge of institutional investors’ order
flow and can position themselves to benefit.
In addition, the growth
of the financial industry has coincided with the
move to floating exchange rates and market
liberalisation. The result has been the creation
of a whole series of instruments, mainly
derivatives, designed to deal with the risks of
interest-rate and currency movements. The more
complex the product, the less transparent it is
to customers; that makes it harder to judge the
price they are being charged. The surge in
trading volumes is also significant; at every
stage the finance industry takes a cut in the
form of a bid-offer spread, a fee or a
commission. This churning is a classic
rent-seeking activity.
What to do about it? At
the moment, governments are wading in with all
kinds of levies and regulations, which will
probably have unintended consequences. Rather
than tackle the big problem (for example, by
breaking up the banks), they waste their time on
populist measures like banning short-selling.
It would be far better
if the private sector could deal with the
problem. Paul Woolley, a former fund manager who
set up centres for studying capital-market
dysfunctionality at the London School of
Economics and the University of Toulouse, has
published a manifesto which he believes should
be adopted by the world’s biggest public,
pension and charitable investment funds. Among
other things, he proposes that the funds should
adopt a long-term investment approach, cap
annual portfolio turnover at 30%, refuse to pay
performance fees or invest in alternative assets
such as hedge funds and private equity, and
invest only in securities traded on a public
exchange (so no structured products like the
infamous collateralised debt obligations).
Some will argue with
the details but the thrust of the argument is
simple. If the big funds in effect own the
market in aggregate, then frenetic trading
activity is fruitless, even before costs.
Perhaps they are chasing a chimera: they all
wish to be above-average performers. Perhaps
they are bamboozled by an asset-management
industry that competes not on price but on the
basis of (probably unrepeatable) past
performance. Whatever the reason, the effect is
that the returns that millions of savers hope to
earn end up being paid to the finance sector as
rents. |
|
GRASSHOPPERS
AND ANTS |
|
 |
| FINANCIAL TIMES -
Everybody in the west knows the fable of the
grasshopper and the ant.
The grasshopper is lazy and sings away the
summer, while the ant piles up stores for the
winter. When the cold weather comes, the
grasshopper begs the ant for food. The ant
refuses and the grasshopper starves. The moral
of this story? Idleness brings want.
Yet life is more
complex than in Aesop’s fable. Today, the ants
are
Germans,
Chinese and Japanese, while the grasshoppers are
American, British,
Greek,
Irish and Spanish. Ants produce enticing goods
grasshoppers want to buy. The latter ask whether
the former want something in return. “No,” reply
the ants. “You do not have anything we want,
except, maybe, a spot by the sea. We will lend
you the money. That way, you enjoy our goods and
we accumulate stores.”
Ants and grasshoppers
are happy. Being frugal and cautious, the ants
deposit their surplus earnings in supposedly
safe banks, which relend to grasshoppers. The
latter, in turn, no longer need to make goods,
since ants supply them so cheaply. But ants do
not sell them houses, shopping malls or offices.
So grasshoppers make these, instead. They even
ask ants to come and do the work. Grasshoppers
find that with all the money flowing in, the
price of land rises. So they borrow more, build
more and spend more.
The ants look at the
prosperity of grasshopper colonies and tell
their bankers: “Lend even more to grasshoppers,
since we ants do not want to borrow.” Ants are
far better at making real products than at
assessing financial ones. So grasshoppers
discover clever ways of packaging their
grasshopper loans into enticing assets for ant
banks.
Now, the German ant
nest is very close to some small colonies of
grasshoppers. German ants say: “We want to be
friends. So why do we not all use the same
money? But, first, you must promise to behave
like ants forever.” So grasshoppers have to pass
a test: behave like ants for a few years. The
grasshoppers do so and are then allowed to adopt
the European money.
Everyone lives happily,
for a while. The German ants look at their loans
to grasshoppers and feel rich. Meanwhile, in
grasshopper colonies, their governments look at
their healthy accounts and say: “Look, we are
better at sticking to the fiscal rules than
ants.” Ants find this embarrassing. So they say
nothing about the fact that wages and prices are
rising fast in grasshopper colonies, making
their goods more expensive, while lowering the
real burden of interest, so encouraging yet more
borrowing and building.
Wise German ants
insist, gloomily, that “trees do not grow to the
sky”. Land prices finally peak in the
grasshopper colonies. Ant banks duly become
nervous and ask for their money back. So
grasshopper debtors are forced to sell. This
creates a chain of bankruptcy. It also halts
construction in the grasshopper colonies and
grasshopper spending on ant goods. Jobs
disappear in both grasshopper colonies and ant
nests and fiscal deficits soar, especially in
grasshopper colonies.
German ants realise
that their stores of wealth are not worth much
since grasshoppers cannot provide them with
anything they want, except for cheap houses in
the sun. Ant banks either have to write off bad
loans or they must persuade ant governments to
give even more ant money to the grasshopper
colonies. Ant governments are afraid to admit
that they have allowed their banks to lose the
ants’ money. So they prefer the latter course,
called a
“bail-out”.
Meanwhile, they order the governments of the
grasshoppers to raise taxes and slash spending.
Now, they say, you must really behave like ants.
So the grasshopper colonies go into a deep
recession. But grasshoppers still cannot make
anything ants want to buy, because they do not
know how to do so. Since grasshoppers can no
longer borrow, to buy goods from ants, they
starve. The German ants finally write off their
loans to grasshoppers. But, having learnt little
from this experience, they sell their goods, in
return for yet more debt, elsewhere.
As it happens, in the
wider world, there are other ant nests. Asia, in
particular, is full of them. There is a rich
nest, rather like Germany, called Japan. There
is also a huge, but poorer, nest called China.
These also want to become rich by selling goods
to grasshoppers at low prices and building up
claims on grasshopper colonies. The Chinese nest
even fixes the foreign price of its
currency
at a level that guarantees the extreme cheapness
of its goods. Fortunately, for the Asians, or so
it seems, there happens to be a very big and
exceptionally industrious grasshopper colony,
called America. Indeed, the only way you would
know it is a grasshopper colony is that its
motto is: “In shopping we trust”. Asian nests
develop a relationship with America similar to
Germany’s with its neighbours. Asian ants build
up piles of grasshopper debt and feel rich.
Yet there is a
difference. When the crash comes to America and
households stop borrowing and spending and the
fiscal deficit explodes, the government does not
say to itself: “This is dangerous; we must cut
back spending.” Instead, it says: “We must spend
even more, to keep the economy humming.” So the
fiscal deficit becomes enormous.
This makes the Asians
nervous. So the leader of China’s nest tells
America: “We, your creditors, insist you stop
borrowing, just as European grasshoppers are now
doing.” The leader of the American colony
laughs: “We did not ask you to lend us this
money. In fact, we told you it was a folly. We
are going to make sure American grasshoppers
have jobs. If you do not want to lend us money,
raise the price of your currency. Then we will
make what we used to buy and you will no longer
have to lend to us.” So America teaches
creditors a lesson from a dead sage: “If you owe
your bank $100, you have a problem; but if you
owe $100m, it does.”
The Chinese leader does
not want to admit that his nest’s huge pile of
American debt is not going to be worth what it
cost. Chinese people also want to go on making
cheap goods for foreigners. So China decides to
buy yet more American debt, after all. But,
decades later, the Chinese finally say to the
Americans: “Now we would like you to provide us
with goods in return for your debt to us.
Thereupon, the American grasshoppers laugh and
promptly reduce the debt’s value. The ants lose
the value off their savings and some of them
then starve to death.
What is the moral of
this fable? If you want to accumulate enduring
wealth, do not lend to grasshoppers.
martin.wolf@ft.com
More columns at
www.ft.com/martinwolf
Read and post
comments at
Martin Wolf’s blog |
 |
|
FINANCIAL
DOOMSDAY MACHINE |
|
 |
|
Financial Times London - Can we afford our
financial system? The answer is no.
Understanding why this is so is a necessary
condition for evaluating ideas for reform. The
more aware of the risks one is, the more obvious
it becomes that radicalism is the safer option.
How did this happen? Quite simply, the financial
sector has become bigger and riskier. The UK
case is dramatic, with banking assets jumping
from 50 per cent of GDP to more than 550 per
cent over the past four decades. Capital ratios
have fallen sharply, while returns on equity
have become higher and more volatile. As Mr
Haldane notes in
another paper,
leverage is the chief determinant of returns on
equity and increased leverage also explains the
level and volatility of banking returns.
Finally, the banking sector has also become
substantially more concentrated.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2e4dbb0-4caa-11df-9977-00144feab49a.html |
 |
|
THE NEW
GEOLOGICAL ERA - THE ANTHROPOCENE |
|
 |
| Humans
have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes
on the planet that we may be ushering in a new
period of geological history. Through pollution,
population growth, urbanisation, travel, mining
and use of fossil fuels we have altered the
planet in ways which will be felt for millions
of years, experts believe. It is feared that the
damage mankind has inflicted will lead to the
sixth largest mass extinction in Earth’s history
with thousands of plants and animals being wiped
out. The new epoch, called the Anthropocene –
meaning new man – would be the first period of
geological time shaped by the action of a single
species. new working group of experts has
now been established to gather all the evidence
which would support recognising it as the
successor to the current Holocene epoch. The
theory has been proposed by a group of
scientists, including Paul Crutzen, the Nobel
Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, in the
journal Environmental Science & Technology. They
conclude: “The Anthropocene represents a new
phase in the history of both humankind and of
the Earth, when natural forces and human forces
became intertwined, so that the fate of one
determines the fate of the other. Geologically,
this is a remarkable episode in the history of
this planet.” Dr Jan Zalasiewicz, of the
University of Leicester, co-author of the paper,
added: “It is suggested that we are in the train
of producing a catastrophic mass extinction to
rival the five previous great losses of species
and organisms in Earth’s geological past.”
|
|
PALESTINIANS RIOT
IN JERUSALEM |
|
 |
| Jerusalem
- Riots erupted in the Holy City as
Palestinians marked a ‘day of rage’ in protest
at Israeli plans to build 1,600 new homes in the
disputed east of the city, which the
Palestinians see as the capital of a future
state. The announcement of the planned
construction has also triggered a diplomatic
crisis between Israel and its most important
ally, the United States, whose envoy George
Mitchell has delayed his return to the region,
officials said. Dozens of masked youths pelted
Israeli police with rocks and set tyres ablaze
in flashpoints across East Jerusalem in the
latest clashes to break out as tensions have
risen in the past week. Thousands of police have
been deployed across the city, and today they
fired stun grenades to try to disperse the
crowds. About two dozen Palestinians were
arrested, officials said. |
|
RATINGS FIRMS
CLOSE IN ON BRITAIN |
|
 |
|
LONDON
CONTRIBUTED TO LEHMAN'S COLLAPSE |
|
 |
| London -
Ernst & Young,
Linklaters and Lehman Brothers' London
operations played key roles in the investment
bank's attempts to mask $50bn (£33bn) of assets
on its balance sheet in the run-up to its
eventual implosion in September 2008. The
two advisers are under fire for their knowledge
of a series of complex transactions known
officially within the bank as "Repo 105", but
referred to by senior staff as "window dressing"
and an "accounting gimmick". The pair's actions
are questioned in court-appointed investigator
Anton Valukas's exhaustive report into the
bank's collapse, which also found that British
bank Barclays received assets it should not have
when later buying Lehman's US brokerage
business. |
|
SCIENTISTS
CONCLUDE DINOSAURS WIPED OUT BY GIANT ASTEROID |
|
 |
| The
conclusion by a panel of 41 international
scientists, that it
was an asteroid that caused the disappearance of
the dinosaurs, has come in a bid to end decades
of speculation. The giant asteroid hit the earth
with the force of a billion Hiroshimas slamming
into the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at 20 times
the speed of a bullet causing earthquakes,
landslides, tsunamis and wildfires. The
destruction, 65 million years ago, was so great
it left most of the world a wasteland, shrouded
in dust, perpetually cold and virtually devoid
of all life and vegetation. |
|
WILL AMERICA, THE
FRAGILE EMPIRE, GO THE WAY OF THE DINOSAURS? |
|
For centuries, historians,
political theorists, anthropologists and the
public have tended to think about the political
process in seasonal, cyclical terms. From
Polybius to Paul Kennedy, from ancient Rome to
imperial Britain, we discern a rhythm to
history. Great powers, like great men, are born,
rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter
whether civilizations decline culturally,
economically or ecologically, their downfalls
are protracted. In the same way, the challenges
that face the United States are often
represented as slow-burning. It is the steady
march of demographics -- which is driving up the
ratio of retirees to workers -- not bad policy
that condemns the public finances of the United
States to sink deeper into the red. It is the
inexorable growth of China's economy, not
American stagnation, that will make the gross
domestic product of the People's Republic larger
than that of the United States by 2027. As for
climate change, the day of reckoning could be as
much as a century away. These threats seem very
remote compared with the time frame for the
deployment of U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, in
which the unit of account is months, not years,
much less decades. But what if history is not
cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic -- at
times almost stationary but also capable of
accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What
if collapse does not arrive over a number of
centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in
the night? Great powers are complex systems,
made up of a very large number of interacting
components that are asymmetrically organized,
which means their construction more resembles a
termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They
operate somewhere between order and disorder.
Such systems can appear to operate quite stably
for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium
but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there
comes a moment when complex systems "go
critical." A very small trigger can set off a
"phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to
a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a
whole pile to collapse. Not long after such
crises happen, historians arrive on the scene.
They are the scholars who specialize in the
study of "fat tail" events -- the low-frequency,
high-impact historical moments, the ones that
are by definition outside the norm and that
therefore inhabit the "tails" of probability
distributions -- such as wars, revolutions,
financial crashes and imperial collapses. But
historians often misunderstand complexity in
decoding these events. They are trained to
explain calamity in terms of long-term causes,
often dating back decades. This is what Nassim
Taleb rightly condemned in "The Black Swan" as
"the narrative fallacy." n reality, most of the
fat-tail phenomena that historians study are not
the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic
story lines; instead, they represent
perturbations, and sometimes the complete
breakdowns, of complex systems. To understand
complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural
scientists use the concept. Think of the
spontaneous organization of termites, which
allows them to construct complex hills and
nests, or the fractal geometry of water
molecules as they form intricate snowflakes.
Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a
product of the interaction of billions of
neurons in the central nervous system. All these
complex systems share certain characteristics. A
small input to such a system can produce huge,
often unanticipated changes -- what scientists
call "the amplifier effect." Causal
relationships are often nonlinear, which means
that traditional methods of generalizing through
observation are of little use. Thus, when things
go wrong in a complex system, the scale of
disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate.
There is no such thing as a typical or average
forest fire, for example. To use the jargon of
modern physics, a forest before a fire is in a
state of "self-organized criticality": It is
teetering on the verge of a breakdown, but the
size of the breakdown is unknown. Will there be
a small fire or a huge one? It is nearly
impossible to predict. The key point is that in
such systems, a relatively minor shock can cause
a disproportionate disruption. Any large-scale
political unit is a complex system. Most great
empires have a nominal central authority --
either a hereditary emperor or an elected
president -- but in practice the power of any
individual ruler is a function of the network of
economic, social and political relations over
which he or she presides. As such, empires
exhibit many of the characteristics of other
complex adaptive systems -- including the
tendency to move from stability to instability
quite suddenly. The most recent and familiar
example of precipitous decline is the collapse
of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of
hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of
rot within the Soviet system back to the
Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the
historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin
has argued, it was only the high oil prices of
the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this
did not seem to be the case at the time. The
Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S.
stockpile. And governments in what was then
called the Third World, from Vietnam to
Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets'
favor for most of the previous 20 years. Yet,
less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev
took power, the Soviet imperium in central and
Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the
Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire
fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining,
it was the one founded by Lenin.If empires are
complex systems that sooner or later succumb to
sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are
the implications for the United States today?
First, debating the stages of decline may be a
waste of time -- it is a precipitous and
unexpected fall that should most concern
policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial
falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm
bells should therefore be ringing very loudly
indeed as the United States contemplates a
deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion --
about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War
II. These numbers are bad, but in the realm of
political entities, the role of perception is
just as crucial. In imperial crises, it is not
the material underpinnings of power that really
matter but expectations about future power. The
fiscal numbers cited above cannot erode U.S.
strength on their own, but they can work to
weaken a long-assumed faith in the United
States' ability to weather any crisis. One day,
a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps
a negative report by a rating agency -- will
make the headlines during an otherwise quiet
news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few
policy wonks who worry about the sustainability
of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large,
not to mention investors abroad. It is this
shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system
is in big trouble when its component parts lose
faith in its viability. Over the last three
years, the complex system of the global economy
flipped from boom to bust -- all because a bunch
of Americans started to default on their
subprime mortgages, thereby blowing huge holes
in the business models of thousands of highly
leveraged financial institutions. The next phase
of the current crisis may begin when the public
begins to reassess the credibility of the
radical monetary and fiscal steps that were
taken in response. Neither interest rates at
zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a
sustainable recovery if people in the United
States and abroad collectively decide,
overnight, that such measures will ultimately
lead to much higher inflation rates or outright
default. Bond yields can shoot up if
expectations change about future government
solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal
crisis by driving up the cost of interest
payments on new debt. Just ask Greece. Ask
Russia too. Fighting a losing battle in the
mountains of the Hindu Kush has long been a
harbinger of imperial fall. What happened 20
years ago is a reminder that empires do not in
fact appear, rise, reign, decline and fall
according to some recurrent and predictable life
cycle. It is historians who retrospectively
portray the process of imperial dissolution as
slow-acting. Rather, empires behave like all
complex adaptive systems. They function in
apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period.
And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.
Washington, you have been warned. Niall
Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University
and Harvard Business School, and a fellow of
Jesus College, Oxford. |
|
TRAGEDY HITS
CHILE IN MASSIVE QUAKE |
|
 |
| A
huge earthquake has shaken
Chile,
killing more than 200 people, causing buildings
to collapse, starting fires and unleashing a
tsunami across the Pacific. With a magnitude of
8.8, it opened cracks in the earth, flipped cars
and devastated the city of Concepción, 70 miles
from the epicentre. The number of dead quickly
rose to 214, and is expected to increase. The
Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet, declared a
"state of catastrophe" as emergency teams
scrambled over rubble looking for survivors. The
Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued an alert
for countries in Latin America as well as Japan,
Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia and French
Polynesia. A massive wave hit Robinson Crusoe
island, the largest of the Juan Fernández
archipelago, where at least three people were
killed. Residents were evacuated from the
coastal areas of Easter Island. |
|
NASA PROBE FINDS
TREES ON MARS |
|
 |
|
Unfortunately for our science fiction fans
the trees are actually trails of dark basaltic
sand debris and erupting dust clouds caused by
landslides as dry ice (composed of frozen carbon
dioxide) melts off the dunes during Martian
spring. |
|
AMONGST ALL THE
BAD NEWS SOMETHING SPARKLES! |
|
 |
|
Gemstone producer
Gemfields
today announced the discovery of an
'exceptional' 6,225 carat rough emerald in its
Kagem mine in Zambia. The emerald was recovered
during normal mining operations on February 5,
the company said in a statement, and is being
examined by Gemfields' experts to establish a
clearer understanding of its value and
significance. The emerald has been named "Insofu"
(which means "elephant" in the language of the
Bemba people indigenous to the region) due to
its size and in honour of the World Land Trust's
"Wild Lands Elephant Corridor Project", of which
Gemfields is a participant. |
|
MAN JAILED IN
DUBAI FOR WEARING THIS T-SHIRT |
|
 |
|
Dubai -
A man has been jailed in Dubai
for wearing a cancer awareness Marc Jacobs
T-shirt featuring a nearly-nude picture of
Victoria Beckham.
A number of
celebrities, including the actress Winona Ryder
and the model Naomi Campbell, posed for the
T-shirts, which aim to raise money for a skin
cancer research project at New York University.
Raffi Nernekian, a Lebanese national, was
arrested after an argument with a local man
about the T-shirt, in which the key parts of
Beckham's body are obscured either by her hands
or the logo 'Protect the skin you're in'. Mr
Nernekian was subsequently jailed for offending
public decency for a month, a sentence upheld on
appeal. He will be deported after serving his
sentence, even though he has lived in the city
for five years. Mr Nernekian's brother said he
bought the T-shirt on a visit to New York. It
was one of a series produced by the designer
Marc Jacobs, for whose local agents Mr Nernekian
works as a brand manager. A number of
celebrities, including the actress Winona Ryder
and the model Naomi Campbell, posed for the
T-shirts, which aim to raise money for a skin
cancer research project at New York University.
Mr Nernekian was approached in a bakery by a
local man who complained about his T-shirt.
After an argument, he left to change, but when
he returned he found the police waiting for him.
|
|
IS A GREEK
TRAGEDY COMING TO THE USA? |
 |
|
Financial Times: It began in Athens. It is
spreading to
Lisbon
and
Madrid.
But it would be a grave mistake to assume that
the
sovereign debt crisis that
is unfolding
will remain confined to the weaker eurozone
economies. The
Obama administration’s new
budget blithely
assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the
next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4
per cent. But with rising real rates, growth
might well be lower. Under those circumstances,
interest payments could soar as a share of
federal revenue – from a tenth to a fifth to a
quarter. Last week Moody’s Investors Service
warned that the triple A credit rating of the US
should not be taken for granted. That warning
recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed
before he returned to government): “How long can
the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s
biggest power?” On reflection, it is appropriate
that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in
Greece, the birthplace of western civilization.
Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But
the key question is when that crisis will reach
the last bastion of western power, on the other
side of the Atlantic. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
IRANIAN TROOPS |
 |
|
SHARKS IN WAITING |
 |
|
These tankers
have been parked off the British coast for
months, refusing to unload their oil until
prices have risen even higher. The delay makes
millions for speculators... and keeps your
petrol costs soaring. Laden with fuel, three oil
tankers sit idly within sight of the British
coastline, playing a waiting game that is
driving up petrol prices for hard-pressed
motorists. They are part of a flotilla of ten
vessels refusing to unload their cargo until
market speculation has driven up its price to
the level they want. And as the value of that
cargo is currently rising by over £1million a
day, driven partly by profiteering traders and
speculators, it is unlikely to see a petrol
station any time soon.
|
|
WATER ON MOON |
 |
| “Indeed yes, we
found water,” Anthony Colaprete, the
principal investigator for
NASA’s
Lunar Crater Observation
and Sensing Satellite,
said in a news conference. “And we didn’t find
just a little bit. We found a significant
amount.” The confirmation of scientists’
suspicions is welcome news to explorers who
might set up home on the lunar surface and to
scientists who hope that the water, in the form
of ice accumulated over billions of years, holds
a record of the solar system’s history. The
satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross),
crashed into a crater near
the Moon’s south pole a month ago.
The 5,600-miles-per-hour impact carved out a
hole 60 to 100 feet wide and kicked up at least
26 gallons of water. “We got more than just a
whiff,” Peter H. Schultz, a professor of
geological sciences at
Brown University
and a co-investigator of the mission, said in a
telephone interview. “We practically tasted it
with the impact.” |
|
A GIGANTIC
FINANCIAL CUCKOO IN THE NEST |
|
 |
|
FIGHTING THE
TALIBAN IN PAKISTAN |
|
 |
|
The Pakistani
military says it has seized Taliban bases
during the first day of a ground offensive in
South Waziristan. At least five soldiers and 11
fighters were killed in the fighting, Pakistani
officials said on Sunday. As many as 150,000
civilians have left the area in recent months
after the army made clear it was planning an
assault.
But
there are perhaps as many as 350,000 still in
the region. Security forces captured a Taliban
stronghold at Spinkai Raghzai on Saturday after
the fighters withdrew from their fortifications
and took refuge in nearby mountains, officials
said.
Earlier, the
officials reported that gun battles were taking
place outside Spinkai Raghzai as well as Kalkala
and Sharwangai. Intelligence officials said the
ground troops were advancing on two flanks and a
northern front of a central part of South
Waziristan controlled by the Mehsuds. The areas
being surrounded include the Taliban bases of
Ladha and Makeen, the officials said. |
|
NASA CRASHES
ROCKET ON MOON |
|
 |
| MOFFETT
FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's Lunar Crater Observation
and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin
impacts on the moon's surface early Friday in a
search for water ice. Scientists will analyze
data from the spacecraft's instruments to assess
whether water ice is present. The satellite
traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic
113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater,
a permanently shadowed region near the moon's
south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18
as a companion mission to the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA's Kennedy Space
Center in Florida. |
|
BRITISH ARMY IN
AFGHANISTAN |
|
 |
|
DOUBTS OVER
AFGHANISTAN |
|
 |
|
KABUL,
Afghanistan
— A powerful suicide bomb that killed six
Italian soldiers here on Thursday prompted Prime
Minister
Silvio Berlusconi
of Italy to declare that his nation had begun
planning to “bring our young men home as soon as
possible."
In Brussels,
Mr. Berlusconi, a close American ally but in
political trouble at home, was careful to say
that Italy would not unilaterally withdraw its
3,100 troops from Afghanistan, though he said he
wanted the withdrawal to happen “as quickly as
possible.” But it seemed the strongest
expression yet from a European leader of the
rising doubts about the
Afghanistan mission
among America’s allies. |
|
STOCK MARKET
ROLLERCOASTER RIDE |
 |
| For equity
investors, 2009 has been a white-knuckle ride.
The roller coaster journey has seen the FTSE 100
slump to 3,512 before peaking at 4,638, all
within six months. A dismal start to the year
paved the way for a rally in March, which in
turn was followed by a bout of profit taking,
before stocks started climbing once again –
despite corporate earnings and economic news
remaining mixed. On Friday, worse-than-expected
figures showed that UK GDP had fallen by a
record 0.8pc in the second quarter. The economy
has now shrunk by 5.7pc over the last year. Yet
the FTSE 100 continued its buoyant run, closing
at 4,576, a tenth straight gain. It is now up
nearly 9pc since this latest winning run started
on July 13. There was a similar story overseas.
The Dow Jones passed 9,000 for the first time
since January, the S&P 500 hit its highest level
since Barack Obama came to office and the Nasdaq
was enjoying its biggest run of gains since
1992. Asian markets also enjoyed an upbeat week.
Equities are not meant to rally in the middle of
the year; the summer months tend to be typified
by low volumes and drifting markets. "Sell in
May and go away, come back on St Leger Day" used
to be the traditional trading floor refrain. Yet
on Wednesday, the FTSE 100 pushed above 4,500
for the first time since January. |
|
CHINA LIFTING ONE
CHILD POLICY |
 |
| SHANGHAI -
The easing of restrictions comes in response
to concern about economic problems caused by the
country's ageing population. Shanghai is
actively promoting the two-child policy as China
tries to defuse a demographic time bomb caused
by a shortage of young workers after 30 years of
tough population growth restrictions. The city
government is worried about the rapidly rising
number of elderly people and the resulting
burden and drag on the Chinese economy. "We
advocate eligible couples to have two kids
because it can help reduce the proportion of
ageing people and alleviate a workforce shortage
in the future," said Xie Lingli, the head of
Shanghai's family planning commission, to the
China Daily newspaper. The policy shift will
prove popular. A recent survey released by the
Shanghai family planning commission showed that
more than half of 4,800 respondents, aged
between 20 and 30, said would like a second
child if the one-child policy was eased. China's
one-child policy was originally designed to make
sure the huge country's population remained at a
manageable size, given the country's relatively
low water, energy and food resources. Experts
predicted earlier this week that there will be
zero growth in China's population of 1.3 billion
people by 2030. |
|
FORTY YEARS AFTER
MOON LANDING APOLLO BLASTS OFF |
|
 |
|
Forty years after the historic Apollo 11 mission
to the Moon, Nasa's Space Shuttle Endeavour and
seven astronauts blasted off from the Kennedy
Space Centre in Florida to begin a 16-day trip
to deliver the last piece of Japan's research
laboratory to the International Space Station. |
|
BRITAIN BLOCKS
SPARE PARTS TO ISRAEL |
 |
|
In a move that threatens to strain diplomatic
ties, Britain has blocked the sale of spare
parts for Israel’s fleet of missile gunships
because they were used in the recent campaign in
Gaza. The first country to revoke an arms
licence in response to the war in Gaza six
months ago, Britain told the Israeli Embassy in
London that five of the export requests for
parts for the Sa’ar 4.5 gunships had been
rejected because the vessels had fired on Gaza
during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s
controversial 23-day campaign against the
militant group Hamas. The spare parts were
intended for the ships’ guns. |
|
 |
| CAPE
COAST,
Ghana
—
President Obama
traveled in his father’s often-troubled home
continent on Saturday, where he symbolized a new
political era but brought a message of tough
love: American aid must be matched by Africa’s
responsibility for its own problems. “We must
start from the simple premise that Africa’s
future is up to Africans,” Mr. Obama said in an
address
televised across the continent. For all its
previous sins, he said, “the West is not
responsible for the destruction of the
Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars
in which children are enlisted as combatants.”
To build a prosperous future, he said, Africa
needs to shed corruption and tyranny and take on
poverty and disease. “These things can only be
done if you take responsibility for your
future,” he told Parliament in Accra, Ghana’s
capital. “And it won’t be easy. It will take
time and effort. There will be suffering and
setbacks. But I can promise you this: America
will be with you every step of the way, as a
partner, as a friend.” |
|
BATTLE AGAINST
TALIBAN |
 |
| At
daybreak, some 700 men of the Light Dragoons
Battle Group, to which the men of B Company,
2nd Battalion Mercian Regiment (Worcesters and
Foresters) are attached, are about to launch the
main thrust of Operation Panchai Palang -
Panther's Claw - the largest British ground
offensive against Afghan insurgents.
Considerable airpower and concentrations of
armour have been brought to bear. But it has
fallen to the Mercians to lead the ground
assault. B Company is led by Major Stewart Hill.
Before the operation begins, he asks his
assembled soldiers: 'Is it to be the insurgents'
summer or will it belong to us? Of course, it's
going to be ours.' Forward Operating Base Price
is in the desert a few kilometres south west of
Gereshk. Usually, it is manned by a Danish
battle group. Earlier this week it was also the
temporary home of the men of the Light Dragoons
Battle Group, which includes the 2nd Mercians
and their attached support units. Dawn on
Wednesday saw the first ground moves of the
operation. The Danish battle group moved out of
FOB Price, led by three Leopard main battle
tanks. Theirs was a diversionary operation, to
probe the Taliban and conceal the place at which
the first British troops would cross the canal,
48 hours later. To give them credit, the Taliban
did not hesitate to engage the approaching heavy
armour with small arms fire from across the
canal. |
|
CITY OF LONDON
RENTS FALL 19% |
 |
|
LONDON - The banking
meltdown has seen rents in the City fall by
19 per cent over the past year, new figures
show. The collapse of the financial sector has
crushed demand for pieds-à-terre in the Square
Mile, meaning those still flat hunting can
negotiate far better deals with landlords. The
average City rent is now £916 a month, still the
highest in the capital. A year ago it was
£1,217. |
 |
|
MADOFF GETS 150
YEARS PRISON |
| A criminal
saga that began in December with a string of
superlatives — the largest, longest and most
widespread
Ponzi scheme
in history — ended the same way on Monday as
Bernard L. Madoff
was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the
maximum for his crimes. Mr. Madoff, looking
thinner and more haggard than when he pleaded
guilty in March, stood impassively as Federal
District Judge
Denny Chin
condemned his crimes as “extraordinarily evil”
and imposed a sentence that was three times as
long as the federal probation office suggested
and more than 10 times as long as defense
lawyers had requested.Though many questions
still surround the case, the judge’s
pronouncement offered a brief sense of
resolution, followed by a short burst of
applause and one stifled cheer from the victims
who filled the soaring Lower Manhattan
courtroom. Only a few moments before, Mr. Madoff
had apologized for the harm he inflicted on the
clients who had trusted him, his employees and
his family. He blamed his pride, which would not
allow him to admit his failures as a money
manager. “I am responsible for a great deal of
suffering and pain. I understand that,” he said,
leaning slightly forward over the polished
table, his charcoal suit sagging on his
diminished frame. “I live in a tormented state
now, knowing of all the pain and suffering that
I have created.” |
|
CLEVER CARLA AND
TROUBLED KAREN MULDER |
 |
They were
among the first of the fashion
supermodels. Inseparable as the pair
seemed then, their lives have taken very
different directions.On Tuesday this
week, while Carla, now Madame Bruni
Sarkozy, the French president's wife,
consulted her diary for engagements,
Karen was in a Paris police station
having been arrested for allegedly
making death threats to her plastic
surgeon. |
|
|
NASA BLASTS OFF TO PREPARE PATH
FOR MANNED LUNAR MISSION BY 2020 |
 |
Nasa’s most ambitious lunar
exploration mission since
the Apollo era blasted off from
Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre
last night — with scientists
hoping that a crash landing will
pave the way for man to return
to the Moon for the first time
since 1972. One half of the $580
million project (£350 million)
is designed to smash a piece of
rocket casing the size of a
pick-up truck into a remote
crater on the dark side of the
Moon, sending up 350 tons of
lunar debris that will be
analysed by a probe following
four minutes behind in an
attempt to confirm the existence
of water. The other half, a
four-metre long robotic
satellite known as the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter, will
spend years circling the Moon at
an altitude of 31 miles,
scanning its surface in greater
detail than ever before and
sending back to Earth
unprecedented images of areas
that could be used as future
landing sites and human
habitats. The exercise is
essential if Nasa is to meet its
objective of returning
astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
|
|
TROUBLE AT WORLD TRADE CENTER |
|
More
than seven years after the Twin
Towers were destroyed, the
public and private bodies
involved in the site are still
wrangling over fundamental
aspects of the reconstruction.
Two of the mighty towers planned
for the site are in danger of
being shrunk to a mere 25
storeys. The astoundingly
expensive National September 11
Memorial & Museum has had its
projected completion put back so
that it is now due to be
finished, just in time for the
tenth anniversary of 9/11, in
2011. The Freedom Tower, the
emblem of the rebuilding, is now
rising towards its symbolically
significant height of 1,776 feet
( independence), and it is due
for completion in 2014. |
 |
|
EXTREME RIGHT BRITISH
NATIONALIST PARTY WINS TWO SEATS
IN EU PARLIAMENT |
 |
|
Far-Right
parties and extremist parties
made gains across Europe as
protest votes and low turnouts
marked the European parliament
elections. Anti-immigrantion and
far-right groups made
significant gains in the
Netherlands, Austria, Hungary,
Denmark, Slovakia and Finland.
Geert Wilders and his far-Right
anti-Islamic immigrant party
shot to second place behind the
ruling Christian Democrats by
taking 17 per cent of the vote
in the Netherlands. In Austria
too, two anti-immigrant
far-Right parties took an
unprecedented 17.7 per cent of
the vote. The far-Right Danish
People's Party won two seats and
took 14.4 per cent of Denmark's
vote. In Slovakia a low turnout
of just 19.4 per cent propelled
an anti-gipsy extremist
ultra-nationalist into the
parliament and Hungary's
far-Right Jobbik took three
seats for the first time. |
|
HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN AS GORDON
LOOKS ON |
 |
|
GOOD NEWS - AT LEAST FOR THIS
LUCKY LOTTERY WINNER |
|
 |
|
OBAMA ADDRESSES MUSLIM WORLD |
|
 |
|
Pledging to seek a new beginning
between the United States and
Muslims, President Obama reached
out to the world's 1.5 billion
followers of Islam on Thursday,
addressing an appreciative crowd
at Cairo University. Quoting
from the Quran, the Talmud and
the Bible — and closing to a
standing ovation — Obama said
his address was an effort to
"speak the truth" about U.S.
relations with the Muslim world.
Several times during the
hour-long speech, members of the
audience shouted, "We love you."
The same day Obama made his
speech, a seven-month-old baby
died in the intensive care unit
of the European Gaza Hospital in
the Gaza Strip. His name was
Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and
he was suffering from a lung
infection which was treatable.
Denied basic equipment, the
doctors in Gaza could do
nothing. For weeks, the child’s
parents had sought a permit from
the Israelis to allow them to
take him to a hospital in
Jerusalem, where he would have
been saved. Like many
desperately sick people who
apply for these permits, the
parents were told they had never
applied. Even if they had
arrived at the Erez Crossing
with an Israeli document in
their hands, the odds are that
they would have been turned back
for refusing the demands of
officials to spy or collaborate
in some way. |
|
NORTH KOREA TESTS ATOMIC BOMB |
 |
|
North Korea is led by a
communist dynastic ruler,
Kim Jong-il,
who suceeded his father as the
country's dictator and now
intends to install his son,
Kim Jong-un
as his successor. |
|
THIS MAN THREATENS PEACE IN ASIA |
|
|
|
NO ITS NOT GHOST BUSTERS - ITS A
NEW YORK DISASTER EXERCISE |
 |
|
TAMIL TIGER LEADER SHOT DEAD |
 |
|
The leader of Sri Lanka's
Tamil Tiger rebels, Velupillai
Prabhakaran, has been killed
along with his son and other
Tiger commanders, according to
reports. Prabhakaran was ambushed and
shot dead while trying to flee
government troops as special
forces closed in on the last
rebel fortifications, it was
reported today. However that account of
events was disputed by a
military spokesman who said that
there had been no identification
of Prabhakaran as yet.
|
 |
|
The Sri Lankan army killed a
number of other senior Tamil
Tiger commanders as fighting
continued to rage despite the
Tigers' weekend admission of
defeat. Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara,
a military spokesman,
said that commando
units and other crack government
troops were trading machine gun
fire with “a couple of hundred”
of Tiger fighters hunkered down
in fortified bunkers, thought to
include several senior rebel
leaders. The conflict area had been
reduced to a patch of land just
100 metres by 100 metres, he
added. Tens of thousands of
civilians who had been caught in
the crossfire were finally
allowed to flee to freedom over
the weekend. |
 |
|
A senior defence official
said Prabhakaran had been killed
while trying to flee the area in
an ambulance with two close
aides. "He was killed with two
others inside the vehicle," the
official told AFP. The government said that they
had found the body of
Prabhakaran's 24 year old son
Charles Anthony, the heir
apparent of the Tigers’
leadership. The head of the rebels’
political wing, Balasingham
Nadesan, the head of the Tigers'
defunct peace secretariat,
Seevaratnam Puleedevan, and
their eastern leader, S. Ramesh
were also said to be among the
dead. Independent verification of
the situation is all but
impossible as journalists are
not being allowed near the
conflict zone. The International
Committee of the Red Cross, the
only neutral organisation
allowed access, said
that it had lost contact with
its 25 staff members on the
battlefield yesterday morning.
|
|
Manhattan Declaration on Climate
Change
“Global warming” is not a global
crisis
We, the scientists and
researchers in climate and
related fields, economists,
policymakers, and business
leaders, assembled at Times
Square, New York City,
participating in the 2008
International Conference on
Climate Change,
Resolving that
scientific questions should be
evaluated solely by the
scientific method;
Affirming that global
climate has always changed and
always will, independent of the
actions of humans, and that
carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a
pollutant but rather a necessity
for all life;
Recognising that the
causes and extent of
recently-observed climatic
change are the subject of
intense debates in the climate
science community and that
oft-repeated assertions of a
supposed ‘consensus’ among
climate experts are false;
Affirming that attempts
by governments to legislate
costly regulations on industry
and individual citizens to
encourage CO2 emission reduction
will slow development while
having no appreciable impact on
the future trajectory of global
climate change. Such policies
will markedly diminish future
prosperity and so reduce the
ability of societies to adapt to
inevitable climate change,
thereby increasing, not
decreasing human suffering;
Noting that warmer
weather is generally less
harmful to life on Earth than
colder:
Hereby declare:
That current plans to restrict
anthropogenic CO2 emissions are
a dangerous misallocation of
intellectual capital and
resources that should be
dedicated to solving humanity’s
real and serious problems.
That there is no convincing
evidence that CO2 emissions from
modern industrial activity has
in the past, is now, or will in
the future cause catastrophic
climate change.
That attempts by governments to
inflict taxes and costly
regulations on industry and
individual citizens with the aim
of reducing emissions of CO2
will pointlessly curtail the
prosperity of the West and
progress of developing nations
without affecting climate.
That adaptation as needed is
massively more cost-effective
than any attempted mitigation,
and that a focus on such
mitigation will divert the
attention and resources of
governments away from addressing
the real problems of their
peoples.
That human-caused climate change
is not a global crisis.
Now, therefore, we
recommend –
That world leaders reject the
views expressed by the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change as well as
popular, but misguided works
such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.
That all taxes, regulations, and
other interventions intended to
reduce emissions of CO2 be
abandoned forthwith.
Agreed at New York, 4 March
2008. |
|
POPE - ONCE A MEMBER OF
HITLER YOUTH CONDEMNS
ANTI-SEMITISM ON VISIT TO HOLY
LAND |
 |
Pope Benedict
used his first speech in Israel
to remember the six million Jews
killed by the Nazis and try to
heal fresh wounds over his
reinstatement of a bishop who
denied the Holocaust. In the 45
years since the Second Vatican
Council rejected the concept of
collective Jewish guilt for
Christ's death, Catholic-Jewish
relations have been haunted by
the Holocaust and the question
of what the church did, or
failed to do, about it. They
went through one of their worst
periods in January after the
pope lifted the excommunication
of four traditionalist bishops,
including one who denied six
million Jews were killed. The
Vatican says it had not known
enough about that British
bishop's past and the church and
Jewish religious leaders now
hope the issue can be closed
with a visit later in the day by
the pontiff to Yad Vashem in
Jerusalem, Israel's memorial to
the victims of the Holocaust.The
pontiff also called for the
establishment of an independent
Palestinian homeland - putting
him at odds with the new Israeli
government. 'Tragically, the
Jewish people have experienced
the terrible circumstances of
ideologies that deny the
fundamental dignity of every
human person,' he said. I will
have the opportunity to honour
the memory of the six million
Jewish victims of the Shoah,'
the German-born pope said, using
the Hebrew term for the
Holocaust, 'and to pray that
humanity will never again
witness a crime of such
magnitude'. Pope Benedict was
forced to join the Hitler Youth
when he reached the age of 14,
in 1941. According to his
official biography, he was an
unenthusiastic member and
refused to attend meetings
although he later served in a
Hitler Youth anti-aircraft unit.
The Pope, who flew into Israel
from Jordan, lashed out at
anti-Semitism, which he said
'continues to rear its ugly
head' in many parts of the
world.
|
Pope
Benedict
XVI
pictured
aged 16
in an
anti-aircraft
unit of
the
Hitler
Youth |
|
Pope Benedict
angered many in
the Muslim world
three years ago
when he quoted a
Medieval text
that
characterized
some of Islam's
Prophet
Muhammad's
teachings as
'evil and
inhuman,'
particularly
'his command to
spread by the
sword the faith.
He later
expressed regret
that his
comments
offended
Muslims.
Benedict also
sparked outrage
earlier this
year among Jews
when he revoked
the
excommunication
of an
ultraconservative
bishop who
denies the
Holocaust. Later
today, Benedict
is scheduled to
lay a wreath at
Israel's Yad
Vashem Holocaust
memorial. In
bidding farewell
to Benedict,
Abdullah issued
a strong call
for a two-state
solution for
Israelis and
Palestinians.
During his three
days in Jordan,
the pope said he
hoped the
Catholic Church
could be a force
for peace in the
region. 'It is
time the
suffering ended
through a
settlement that
will guarantee
the Palestinians
their rights to
freedom and
statehood and
give Israelis
the acceptance
and security
they need,'
Abdullah told
the Pope. |
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BRITONS SEEK SURROGATE MOTHERS
IN INDIA |
 |
|
Growing
numbers of British couples are
going to India to pay surrogate
mothers to have their children.
One father from Ilford told how
he and his wife had spent 13
years trying to have a baby,
before succeeding through a
surrogate mother in Mumbai at a
cost of £50,000. The sperm was
donated by Bobby Bains, who is a
Sikh, and the eggs by a Hindu
woman while the surrogate mother
who carried his daughter Daisy
for nine months is Muslim. The
Indian surrogacy industry has
become a multi-million-pound
business and has prompted calls
for it to be regulated. Bains
and his wife Nikki, 44, who are
trying for a second surrogate
child, said that on a recent
trip Bains was shown a
seventh-floor flat which housed
12 pregnant surrogate mothers.
Each mother is paid between
£2,500 and £3,500 for carrying a
child - equivalent to as much as
10 years' wages for some of the
women on the clinic's books. One
report suggests Indian women
with fairer skin and higher IQs
can charge more for donating
eggs, fertilised in a test tube
and then implanted in the
surrogate mother. Bains said:
"There are hundreds of clinics
doing this in India. A clinic in
Gujarat has 50 pregnancies.
There is one baby born every
week. Fifty girls are staying in
surrogate houses. In one flat I
went to there were pregnant
women sitting around watching
daytime Indian soaps.” The
babies born in the Indian
clinics also face being
effectively stateless and
parents can have long battles to
get British passports for their
children. He estimates that more
than half the inquiries are from
Europeans and about one third,
or 100 a year, are from the UK.
Of those about 90 per cent are
Caucasians. It is estimated that
about 50 pregnant surrogate
mothers are being looked after
by the clinic at any one time.
The clinic charges around
£15,000 for each surrogate baby
born while it costs about £4,000
for each failed attempt. In all
about 140 surrogate mothers give
birth through the clinic each
year. Dr Gautam Allapadia, a
fertility specialist at the
Rotunda clinic, said: “The costs
are substantially less than they
would spend in developed
countries like the US and the
UK. |
|
 |
THE INDEPENDENT NEW YORK
TIMES PRESENTS
A ROUNDUP OF THE
WEEKLY NEWS
PLEASE LET US HAVE
YOUR COMMENTS AND
OPINIONS
CONTACT OUR EDITOR AT
sumpinein@gmail.com
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EMIRATES
ORDERS 32 SUPER AIRBUSES FOR $11.5 BILLION |
|
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| Emirates
ratcheted up the pressure on Europe’s airlines,
spending $11.5 billion on 32 new super Airbuses
that will enable it to grab market share and cut
long-haul fares by up to half. The Gulf
airline’s Airbus order — the largest for
commercial aircraft — will take its A380 fleet
to 90, more than four times as large as the next
operator Qantas. The double-decker aircraft will
add huge numbers of new seats on key routes such
as London to Dubai, pushing down fares as
capacity increases. Emirates fares are already
typically 25 to 50 per cent cheaper than those
offered by European rivals. The additional
capacity offered by the A380s could make it
increasingly difficult for older flag carriers
such as British Airways to compete on certain
routes. |
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JAGUAR LAND ROVER
TO BUILD CARS IN CHINA |
|
 |
|
BBC - Carmaker Jaguar Land
Rover is going to
start assembling vehicles in China, the BBC can
confirm. "We will need to manufacture at least
two models in China," said chief executive
Carl-Peter Forster in an interview. "We'll take
one to two years to set it up, but first we will
need a partner." The company said the move into
China is not a shift out of the UK, where it is
planning to hire an extra 1,000 workers this
year. The new jobs that are being created will
be temporary and are linked to the production of
new compact Range Rover model due next year -
the production version of the Land Rover LRX
that was revealed earlier. "It takes a year or
two before the jobs become permanent," said Mr
Forster, who is also chief executive of Tata
Motors, Jaguar Land Rover's parent company. Last
year, Jaguar Land Rover's workforce in the UK
was reduced by about 2,500 people to 16,000.
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BRITAIN WAS ILL
PREPARED |
|
 |
| THE
TIMES LONDON - Military chiefs and civil
servants ignored warnings that Britain was ill
prepared to send
troops to Helmand and signed off a deeply flawed
plan, a succession of senior figures have told
The Times.
Even those in
charge of the deployment admit that the decision
to go to southern Afghanistan in 2006, which has
cost the lives of nearly 300 servicemen and
women, was a gamble and that mistakes were made
because of poor intelligence. They insist,
however, that the operation was justified to
revitalise the Nato mission, combat the Taleban
and reassert Britain’s military prowess after
setbacks in Iraq. But a two-month investigation
by The Times, which includes interviews
with 32 senior military, political and Civil
Service figures, reveals that there was deep
disquiet over the handling of the mission from
the start. |
|
SIX TIMES SPEED
OF SOUND |
|
 |
| The X-51A
Waverider was released from a B-52
Stratofortress off the southern California
coast and its scramjet engine accelerated the
aircraft to Mach 6, and it flew autonomously for
200 seconds before losing acceleration. At that
point the test was terminated. "We are ecstatic
to have accomplished many of the X-51A test
points during its first hypersonic mission,"
said Charlie Brink, an X-51A program manager
with the Air Force Research Laboratory at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. "We
equate this leap in engine technology as
equivalent to the post-World War II jump from
propeller-driven aircraft to jet engines," he
said. The Waverider was built for the Air Force
by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and Boeing Co.
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RED SHIRTS
SURRENDER |
|
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|
BANGKOK - An anti-government 'red shirt'
supporter surrenders to army soldiers
clearing an encampment of thousands of
protesters in Bangkok. |
|
BRITAIN EXPELS
ISRAELI DIPLOMAT |
|
|
|
London
- The UK expels an Israeli diplomat
over the use of twelve cloned British passports
in a Dubai murder, the BBC has learned. Foreign
Secretary David Miliband will make a statement
to Parliament later. Israel has said there is no
proof that its agents were behind the killing of
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room in
January. Diplomatic sources stressed the British
government has stopped short of accusing Israel
of the murder. However Mr Miliband had demanded
that Israel co-operate fully with the
investigation into how the passports were
obtained. The foreign secretary is to make the
statement after Britain's Serious Organised
Crime Agency found proof of the cloned
passports, said BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen.
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|
GO TO DUBAI AND
GO TO JAIL
BRITONS FACE JAIL FOR KISSING |
|
 |
| Two
Britons accused of kissing in public in
Dubai
face up to a month in prison after a mother
complained her child had seen them. Ayman Najafi,
24, from Palmers Green, and a female friend
named by the Sun as tourist Charlotte Lewis, 25,
launched an appeal in a Dubai court today but
will have to wait three weeks to find out if
they have been successful. Najafi, who has lived
in Dubai for the past 18 months, and Lewis were
arrested last November and accused of kissing,
touching each other intimately and consuming
alcohol. The couple admitted having drunk
alcohol. Drinking alcohol in licensed bars and
restaurants is not illegal in Dubai, but being
out in public afterwards is. The pair, currently
free on bail, were also fined 1,000 dirhams
(£178) for illegal consumption of alcohol, the
lawyer said. They had their passports
confiscated and were to be deported after the
completion of their jail sentence. A lawyer for
the pair said there had been no inappropriate
kissing and the pair were just friends. "There
was no lip kissing. It was just a normal
greeting that is not considered offensive,"
Khalaf al-Hosani told AFP, adding the
complainant's testimony was contradictory. |
| CHURCH HIT
BY ABUSE SCANDAL IN GERMANY |
|
 |
| Berlin — A
widening child sexual abuse inquiry in
Europe has landed at the doorstep of
Pope Benedict XVI,
as a senior church official acknowledged Friday
that a German archdiocese made “serious
mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the
pope served as its archbishop. The archdiocese
said that a priest accused of molesting boys was
given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to
resume pastoral duties, before committing
further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope
Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese
of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s
transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full
responsibility for allowing the priest to later
resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a
statement. |
|
AHMADINEJAD WANTS
ZIONIST FREE MIDDLE EAST |
|
 |
|
The United States should pack up and
leave the Middle
East and stay out of regional affairs,
Iran's president said Thursday during a visit to
Damascus that follows a
string of
US efforts to break up Syria's 30-year alliance
with Teheran. Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad said Arab nations will usher in a
new Middle East 'without Zionists and without
colonialists.' '(The Americans) want to dominate
the region
but they feel Iran and Syria are preventing
that,' Ahmadinejad said during a news conference
with Syrian President Bashar Assad. 'We tell
them that instead of interfering in the region's
affairs, to pack their things and leave.' He
said that 'if the Zionist regime wants to repeat
its past mistakes, this will constitute its
demise and annihilation.' Ahmadinejad said Iran,
Syria, Iraq and Lebanon will stand against
Israel. |
|
 |
|
KILLER WHALE
DRAGS TRAINER TO DEATH |
|
 |
|
Tourists in Florida watched in horror
as a five-tonne killer whale surged out of the
water and grabbed its trainer during a
performance, thrashing her around and holding
her under until she was dead. Paramedics at the
theme park in Orlando were unable to revive Dawn
Brancheau, 40, one of SeaWorld's most
experienced trainers, after yesterday's
incident. It is the third human death to which
Tillikum, the largest Orca whale in captivity,
has been linked. |
|
TOMB OF SAXON
QUEEN DISCOVERED |
|
 |
|
 |
The crumbling
remains of Alfred the Great's granddaughter - a
Saxon princess who married one of the most
powerful men in Europe - have been unearthed
more than 1,000 years after her death. The
almost intact bones of Queen Eadgyth - the early
English form of Edith - were discovered wrapped
in silk, inside a lead coffin in a German
cathedral. Eadgyth - one of the oldest members
of the English royal family - was given in
marriage to the influential Holy Roman Emperor
Otto I and lived in Germany until her death in
946AD, aged 36.
Queen Eadgyth
lived at the dawn of the English nation.
Her grandfather Alfred the Great was the
first monarch to style himself King of the
Anglo Saxons, while her step-brother
Athelstan was the first King of the English.
Her bones were unearthed at Madgeburg
Cathedral in Germany. Although her tomb is
marked in the city's Cathedral by an
elaborate 16th century monument, historians
long believed her remains were lost
centuries ago and that the tomb was empty.
But in 2008, when the lid was removed for
the first time in centuries, archaeologists
discovered a lead coffin inside, bearing
Queen Eadgyth's name and accurately
recording the transfer of her remains in
1510. Inside the coffin was found a nearly
complete female skeleton aged between 30 and
40, wrapped in silk.
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FRANCE TOP 5th
YEAR RUNNING |
|
 |
| Britain has
dropped to 25th place on a list of the best
places in the world to live - behind countries
such as the Czech Republic, Lithuania and
Uruguay. While France tops the poll for the
fifth year running, the UK's climate, crime
rate, cost of living, congested roads and
overcrowded cities have pushed it even further
down from last year's ranking at 20. The Quality
of Life Index, published by International Living
magazine for the 30th year, says the French live
life to the full, while Britons are over-worked.
http://www.internationalliving.com/Internal-Components/Further-Resources/qofl2009 |
|
IS THIS THE
ANSWER TO CLIMATE CHANGE? |
|
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|
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|
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|
THE WORLD ABOUT
TO GO UNDER? |
 |
Dubai World, one of
the emirate's main state holding companies,
said it was asking for a delay on maturities
until at least May 30. It has $60bn in
declared liabilities and one of its
subsidiaries, the "palm island" developer
Nakheel, is due a $3.52bn Islamic bond
repayment, plus charges, on December 14. The
company also unveiled a restructuring programme.
Dubai World's major asset is DP World. Questions
will be asked whether a stake in DP World or
other successful Dubai entities like Emirates
Airlines might ultimately have to be sold to
raise cash. Earlier in the day, Dubai's
government announced it had raised a $5bn bond
for its Financial Support Fund from
government-owned banks in neighbouring Abu
Dhabi. Dubai was among the most dramatic victims
of the credit crunch, with property prices
halving from their highs in September 2008,
leaving a huge overhang of debt. Much of it was
in the hands of government-owned companies, with
Nakheel, which has been forced to slow work on
show-piece developments like its artificial
island chain The World, among the most
prominent. The government's statement made no
mention of default but left other questions
unanswered. "The Dubai Financial Support Fund,
working with the chief restructuring officer,
will start to assess and evaluate the extent of
the restructuring required," it said. "As a
first step, Dubai World intends to ask all
providers of financing to Dubai World and
Nakheel to 'standstill' and extend maturities
until at least May 30." Dubai's sovereign credit
default swaps jumped 111 basis points to 429 –
higher than Iceland's.
 |
|
|
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE COLLAPSE? |
|
 |
| NEW YORK
(Fortune) - When the FDIC closed
Chicago's Corus Bank last month, it may
have signalled the beginning of the next
shock to the banking system: commercial
real estate defaults. Corus, whose
balance sheet was larded with bad
construction loans, is just one of many
banks that have a slew of this debt on
their books. Refinancing the $2 trillion
in commercial mortgages will be tough,
as property values decline. And in this
new age of cautious lending, few banks
are willing to refinance loans. 'There
is a lack of new debt,' says Michael
Haas, a real estate attorney at Jones
Day. 'There is a hesitancy to extend
credit when there is a real possibility
that the real estate may be worth less
than it was a few years ago.' Now, in a
situation eerily similar to the subprime
crisis, the result is likely to be a
wave of foreclosures and loan defaults
that could, in turn, trigger a collapse
in the market of the structured bonds
backed by commercial real estate and
construction debt. |
|
MALDIVES
UNDERWATER CABINET MEETING
|
|
 |
|
Maldives
Ministers Dive Into Cabinet Meeting
Ministers in the Maldives have taken
part in their first underwater cabinet
meeting to draw attention to global
warming. President
Mohamed Nasheed
plunged first into the Indian Ocean
followed by his ministers, all clad in
scuba gear, for the nationally televised
meeting. Mr Nasheed and his deputy,
Mohamed Waheed, and a dozen ministers
sat behind tables arranged in a
horseshoe at a depth of 6m (20ft). They
approved a resolution urging global
action to cut carbon emissions. Tropical
reef fish swam among the ministers and
the nation's red and green flag with
white crescent moon was planted in the
sea bed behind Mr Nasheed.After
surfacing, he called for the UN's
climate summit in Copenhagen in December
to forge a deal to reduce carbon
emissions blamed for rising sea levels
that experts say could swamp the
Maldives by the end of the century. |
|
MEET YOUR
ANCESTOR |
|
 |
|
An ancient human-like creature
that may be a direct ancestor to our
species has been described by
researchers. The assessment of the
4.4-million-year-old animal called
Ardipithecus ramidus is reported in
the journal Science. Even if it is not
on the direct line to us, it offers new
insights into how we evolved from the
common ancestor we share with chimps,
the team says. Fossils of A. ramidus
were first found in Ethiopia in 1992,
but it has taken 17 years to assess
their significance. The most important
specimen is a partial skeleton of a
female nicknamed "Ardi". The
international team has recovered key
bones, including the skull with teeth,
arms, hands, pelvis, legs, and feet. But
the researchers have other fragments
that may represent perhaps at least 36
different individuals, including
youngsters, males, and females. One of
the lead scientists on the project,
Professor Tim White from the University
of California, Berkeley, said the
investigation had been painstaking. "It
took us many, many years to clean the
bones in the National Museum of Ethiopia
and then set about to restore this
skeleton to its original dimensions and
form; and then study it and compare it
with all the other fossils that are
known from Africa and elsewhere, as well
as with the modern age," he told the
journal. "This is not an ordinary
fossil. It's not a chimp. It's not a
human. It shows us what we used to be."
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A TINY
KILLER |
|
 |
|
A miniature version of
Tyrannosaurus rex,
the size of a human being, has been
discovered after an extraordinary fossil
that had been almost lost to the black
market was recovered for science. T.
rex, which lived 60 million years later
than its smaller cousin, shared its body
shape in almost every detail, with an
outsized skull, powerful jaws and teeth,
athletic hind legs built for pursuing
prey and puny forearms. Raptorex
kriegsteini, however, was only a fifth
as long as its more celebrated
successor, 100 times lighter and only 3m
(9ft) from head to tail and 65kg (10st
3lb). T. rex grew to 13m and 7 tonnes
and at the hip was more than twice as
tall as a person. |
|
LEOPARD
GETS BETTER OF CROC |
 |
|
HEALTH
CARE FOR POOR IN US |
 |
| Wendell
Potter can remember exactly when he took
the first steps on his journey to
becoming a whistleblower and turning
against one of the most powerful
industries in America. It was July
2007 and Potter, a senior executive at
giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was
visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden
mountain districts of northeast
Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local
paper for a touring free medical clinic
at a fairground just across the state
border in Wise County, Virginia. Potter,
who had worked at Cigna for 15 years,
decided to check it out. What he saw
appalled him. Hundreds of desperate
people, most without any medical
insurance, descended on the clinic from
out of the hills. People queued in long
lines to have the most basic medical
procedures carried out free of charge.
Some had driven more than 200 miles from
Georgia. Many were treated in the open
air. Potter took pictures of patients
lying on trolleys on rain-soaked
pavements. For Potter it was a dreadful
realization that healthcare in America
had failed millions of poor, sick people
and that he, and the industry he worked
for, did not care about the human cost
of their relentless search for profits.
"It was over-powering. It was just more
than I could possibly have imagined
could be happening in America. Potter
resigned shortly afterwards. Last month
he testified in Congress, becoming one
of the few industry executives to admit
that what its critics say is true:
healthcare insurance firms push up
costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay
out when many patients actually get
sick. In chilling words he told a Senate
committee: "I worked as a senior
executive at health insurance companies
and I saw how they confuse their
customers and dump the sick: all so they
can satisfy their Wall Street
investors." Potter's claims are at the
centre of the biggest political crisis
of Barack Obama's young presidency.
Obama, faced with 47 million Americans
without health insurance, has put
reforming the system at the top of his
agenda. If he succeeds, he will have
pushed through one of the greatest
changes to domestic policy of any
president. If he fails, his presidency
could be broken before it is even a year
old. Last week, in a sign of how high
the stakes are, he addressed the nation
in a live TV news conference. It is the
sort of event usually reserved for a
moment of deep national crisis, such as
a terrorist attack. But Obama wanted to
talk about healthcare. "This is about
every family, every business and every
taxpayer who continues to shoulder the
burden of a problem that Washington has
failed to solve for decades," he told
the nation. |
|
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 |
 |
|
WHERE ARE
THE GREEN SHOOTS? |
 |
| The mother
of all economic crises seems
mysteriously to have vanished in the
face of a determined counter-offensive
by the forces of optimism. There are
daily accounts of returning confidence
in financial and property markets of an
early return to growth. Perhaps those
government ministers who spotted the
"green shoots of recovery" in the frozen
winter earth were not so deluded after
all? The truth is that there is enormous
uncertainty. None of us know whether the
recession will be mild and short, or
deep and prolonged. What we do know is
that there has been a massive policy
response: near zero interest rates;
credit expansion through quantitative
easing; large government fiscal
deficits; bank rescues; and a big
devaluation. |
|
|
MEET YOUR
ANCESTOR |
 |
A
missing link in human evolution
may have been filled by a
remarkable fossil that could be
the common ancestor of all
humans, apes and monkeys.
Darwinius masillae, a small
lemur-like creature that lived
47 million years ago,
illuminates a critical chapter
in the human story when the
primate family tree split into
two branches, one of which led
ultimately to us. The fossil
could even mark the point at
which the evolutionary lineage
of humans, apes and monkeys
diverged from that of more
distant primate cousins such as
lemurs, lorises and bushbabies.
Its anatomical features suggest
that it lies close to the origin
of the human branch and that the
creature, or something like it,
could be an ancient ancestor of
humans. |
|
A
JUMBO SIZED PEDICURE |
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|
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|
ATLANTIS
-
TELESCOPIC ARM CAPTURES HUBBLE TELESCOPE |
 |
|
After
seven years of floating alone in space,
the Hubble Space Telescope has found
a temporary home aboard the space
shuttle Atlantis. Hubble is now secured
on a platform in the shuttle's payload
bay, where astronauts will work for five
consecutive days to refurbish the
telescope and extend its life until at
least 2014. From a perch high above
western Australia, astronaut Megan
McArthur used the shuttle's
15-metre-long robotic arm to grab Hubble
on Wednesday. As the captured telescope
came into view of astronauts in the
shuttle, lead spacewalker John Grunsfeld,
who has visited the telescope on
two previous
shuttle missions,
sent the first dispatch on the condition
of the telescope to mission control:
"I'm just looking out the window here,
and it's an unbelievably beautiful
sight. Amazingly, the exterior of
Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space,
still looks in fantastic shape." |
|
LARGEST
TELESCOPE EVER LAUNCHED BY
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY |
|
 |
|
The largest
space telescope ever launched,
called Herschel, took to the skies on
Thursday, along with a companion called
Planck that will make the most precise
measurements yet of the radiation left
over from the big bang. The Herschel and
Planck space telescopes launched
together aboard an Ariane 5 rocket at
1312 GMT from
Kourou, French
Guiana.
Now the pair, which together cost more
than €2 billion, will make their way
separately to L2, one of Earth's five
Lagrangian points,
where the gravitational tugs from the
Earth and the Sun cancel out. L2 is
situated some 1.5 million kilometres
from Earth – four times the distance
from Earth to the moon. Herschel, which
boasts a 3.5-metre-wide mirror, is
almost four times
as big as its rival Spitzer.
Over the coming years, it will scan the
sky's infrared light, allowing it to
study cool celestial objects, from
comets and asteroids in our own solar
system to some of the universe's most
distant galaxies.By orbiting near L2,
Herschel will be naturally cooled to
some 80 °C above absolute zero. That
will minimise the heat radiating from
the telescope itself, and liquid helium
will cool its detectors even further, to
just 0.3 °C above absolute zero. The
telescope is expected to begin its
scientific observations in September,
after several months of testing out and
calibrating its instruments. |
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WHAT DOES
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS LOOK LIKE? |
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What Does $1 Trillion Look
Like? According to CNN it is
something like this.
They
reported that throughout the
financial crisis, huge sums of money
have been spent, handed out and
lost. With talk of billions upon
billions being passed around, it’s
easy to lose perspective on how much
$1 trillion or even $1 billion
really is. With official
measurements of American currency
from the US Bureau of Printing and
Engraving and the US Mint, here’s
some perspective on what these huge
sums of money would actually look
like and how they would compare to
every day objects. What would
the money allocated to the
TARP actually look like?
How high would the AIG
bonuses pile up if the
bills were stacked one on top of
another? How big, literally, is the
National Debt?
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GIANT SPIDERS INVADE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK |
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Australia was shocked by the size of the
giant venomous spiders that have
invaded an Outback town in Queensland.
Scores of eastern tarantulas, which are
known as bird-eating spiders and can
grow larger than the palm of a man’s
hand, have begun crawling out from
gardens and venturing into public spaces
in Bowen, a coastal town about 700 miles
northwest of Brisbane. Earlier this week
locals spotted an Australian tarantula
wandering towards a public garden in the
centre of town where people often sit
for lunch. They called in a pest
controller, but not before using a can
of insect spray to paralyse the spider.
Audy Geiszler, who runs Amalgamated Pest
Control in Bowen, said that the spider
was a large male with powerful long
fangs and was so big that when he placed
it – dead – in the palm of his hand its
legs hung over his fingers. |
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SANTA
BARBARA HIT BY FIRES |
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SANTA BARBARA - CALIFORNIA The Jesusita
fire slid into canyon fingers along
the ridgeline above Santa Barbara on
Friday, creating a five-mile curtain of
flames and smoke from Goleta to
Montecito and driving 30,500 residents
from their homes. The fire, which leaped
west and east before dawn, did not
spread much during the day, but state
fire officials upped their estimate of
the burned acreage from 3,500 to 8,600,
saying they were able to make a more
accurate assessment. They put the number
of homes damaged or destroyed at 80. |
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BRITISH
HOPE FLOORED IN ROUND TWO IN LAS VEGAS |
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| Briton
Ricky Hatton was left unconscious on the
canvas as his fight career appeared
to be over in Las Vegas last night. The
Hitman had been blown away by the Pacman
– Manny Pacquiao. Hatton was floored for
the third time as Pacquiao, hailed as
the best pound-for-pound fighter in the
world, delivered a brutal left hook to
the Mancunian’s chin during the second
round. Hatton, 30, had already been
knocked down twice in the first round as
the Filipino showed the power of
his right hook. It was a sensational end
to the celebrated showdown. It was also
frightening for Ricky’s mother Carol and
his partner Jennifer – who screamed as
Ricky hit the canvas and looked on in
tears while he was slowly brought back
to his senses. |
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UNITED
ARAB EMIRATES PRINCE OF TORTURE |
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Sheikh Issa bin Zayed Al
Nahyan of the UAE has
tortured a business partner. As a result
Washington is having second thoughts
about a nuclear deal with the UAE after
a torture videotape involving an Abu
Dhabi prince sent shock waves around the
world. The world reacted in shock to
footage that showed Sheikh Issa Bin
Zayed Al Nahyan, son of the late UAE
president and brother of the Abu Dhabi
crown prince, sadistically torturing an
Afghan grain dealer who had allegedly
cheated in a business deal. The victim
was beaten with wooden planks with nails
protruding from them, after which the
prince poured salt on his bleeding
wounds. The video also shows the prince
setting fire to the victim's genitals,
giving him electric shocks with a cattle
prod, ramming desert sand into his
mouth, and firing bullets around him
with an automatic rifle. Senior US
officials speaking on the condition of
anonymity told CNN on Thursday that the
footage had prompted the Obama
administration to shelve the
ratification process of its nuclear deal
with the UAE to protest the stark human
rights violation. Earlier in January,
the Bush administration signed a
controversial deal with the United Arab
Emirates -- the first of its kind
between the US and a Middle Eastern
country. The nuclear deal -- which would
bring US atomic know-how to less than a
hundred miles from Iran's shores -- was
claimed to be a "powerful and timely"
effort against Tehran's uranium
enrichment activities. "The UAE's
approach to development of civil nuclear
energy stands in direct contrast to
Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities
incompatible with IAEA and UN Security
Council resolutions," the US State
Department reasoned at the time. The
release of the torture tape, however,
not only put a damper on US-UAE
relations, it has prompted a campaign
for the deal to be scrapped altogether.
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PRICES FALL 40% PLUS IN
DUBAI |
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Property prices in Dubai
plunged 41% during the
first three months of
this year, a report has
calculated. The decline is from
the last quarter of
2008, said global real
estate consultancy
Colliers International.
It is just the latest
indication of the extent
to which Dubai's
property boom of recent
years has come to an end
in the face of the
worldwide recession. Colliers said prices
had fallen as global
finance has dried up and
job opportunities in
Dubai have declined.
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HOSTAGE KILLED
OFF SOMALIA IN RESCUE ATTEMPT |
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| A young French
yachtsman was shot dead yesterday when
French commandos stormed
his vessel off Somalia,
releasing his wife and three-year-old son and
another couple who had been held captive by
Somali pirates. President Sarkozy offered
condolences as the violent death of Florent
Lemaçon, 28, a computer programmer from
Brittany, stirred emotion in France: the
family’s travels had been followed by many in
the country on their internet blog. Mr Sarkozy
ordered the assault, the seventh in a year by
French forces against Somali pirates, a week
after the Tanit, the Lemaçon’s elderly 36ft
(11m) craft, was seized about 400 miles off the
Somali coast. |
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MOSCOW
ECONOMIC CRISIS |
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Projects have come
to an abrupt halt across
Russia. Developer Mirax
has stopped construction
on its 98-floor
Federation Tower, billed
as Europe's highest. The
half-built skyscraper
stands as a monument to
recession on the Moscow
skyline. The sudden
slide in currencies
across Eastern Europe
has twisted the knife
deeper for companies
with euro and dollar
debts, especially those
geared to home sales.
Russian companies rated
by S&P must roll over
€58bn by the end of next
year. They raised debt
abroad because the
Moscow bourse lacks a
developed bond market.
The problem is that so
many borrowed on short
maturities, betting that
the oil boom would
continue. In the
Ukraine, the president
Viktor Yushchenko,
called for urgent
economic and political
reforms in response to a
huge drop in the
country’s output. In a
state of the nation
address to parliament,
Mr Yushchenko claimed
Ukraine’s gross domestic
product had plunged by
an annual 25 to 30 per
cent in January and
February. He urged
lawmakers to press ahead
with legislation to
clear the way for an IMF
rescue package and
constitutional reforms
to clarify the division
of power between the
president and
parliament. |
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CRISIS IN DUBAI |
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Hovering over
Dubai is a cloud
called nemesis.
The
first time I saw the
place two years ago
through a plane window,
its towers were hovering
in the heat over the
desert, gulping up water
and energy and fussed
round by reputedly a
quarter of the world's
construction cranes.
Even then the vision was
unmistakable, of Ozymandias and his "vast
and trunkless legs of
stone". When prices go
up, buildings go up.
When prices come down,
buildings tend to stay
up. Until recently
visitors to Dubai
returned gasping. This
was truly a city
designed from start to
finish by autocrats and
architects. It was the
last word in iconic
overkill, a festival of
egotism with humanity
denied. It was an
architectural chorus
line of towers, each
shouting louder and
kicking higher. People
were ants. Dubai must have as
many publicists as it
has towers. Business and
travel journalists in
need of a freebie can
just call. So, too, did
a stage army of British
writers who went to last
month's Dubai
International Festival
of Literature,
pretending to discover
that it was not a free
country (and practises
censorship) only after
being installed in their
luxury rooms. A "tower
of Babel" of a place
"with neither charm nor
character", declared an
ungrateful Germaine
Greer. Even as the property
market turned sour last
autumn, the vast
Atlantis hotel, built
for $1.5bn with a whale
shark in its swimming
pool, was spending $20m
on its launch party. Yet
still the supplements
and television
contra-deals spluttered
their superlatives -
recently from a
near-hysterical Piers
Morgan. Every time the
builder of the tallest
tower in the world, the
monster of Burj Dubai,
sees the local ruler,
Sheikh Mohammed
Al-Maktoum, he is told
to add more storeys for
fear someone else may
build an even taller
one. The stockmarket is
down 70% on 2005's
level, and construction
has ceased on half the
unfinished towers that
stretch out into the
desert. Eighty per cent
of the population of
Dubai are passing
migrants who are there,
like gold-diggers of
old, only for the cash.
The cash is going and so
are they, leaving
expensive cars in the
street and at the
airport, many fleeing
possible imprisonment
for debt. Consider, meanwhile,
the city of Detroit.
Here was another that
rose on the shore of an
inland sea, fuelled by
the cult of
hypermobility. With the
implosion of the motor
industry it has gone to
seed. Houses are
pictured boarded-up or
selling for a dollar.
Dogs roam empty streets.
Wind howls through
vacant shops. The
unbelievable has come to
pass. The love child of
America's greatest
postwar passion is
preparing to die. Detroit is part of a
great country that has
shown itself capable of
rescuing even its
rustbelt municipalities.
But this depends on
finding people who will
live in a place from
which most have fled.
Luckily, much of Detroit
is of low-rise plot
housing that could be
transformed at least
into Bohemian
neighbourhoods, like
ruined New Orleans. No such option is
available to Dubai. It
is the ultimate
Corbusian city, rigid in
format and old-fashioned
in conception, based on
the grids and set
squares of
super-planners, and on
grand symbolic buildings
rather than intimate
streets. It cannot
respond to demand and
supply for land and
property, let alone to
the wishes of free
citizens. Human scale is
confined to the
Las-Vegas style replicas
of Florence and Venice
adopted by hotels that
realise guests will not
come if slapped
constantly in the face
by modern architecture.
One business that cannot
afford inhumanity is a
hotel. Such cities are like
the planned science
settlements of Soviet
Russia or the instant
downtowns of American
"metroplexes", in which
people do as planners
ordain. There are no
visual surprises, no
corners of privacy away
from big brother or at
least big car. Buildings
are exclusive and
architecturally
defensive, like London's
Barbican. I can only imagine
that Dubai will one day
be seen as a punctuation
mark on the
architectural follies of
the past half century.
This off-the-shelf city
state has been built on
laundering the profits
of oil, drugs, arms and
western aid. Its sheikh
was not a complete fool,
like comparable African
and Latin American
autocrats. He realised
that city states cannot
live on one product
alone, unless it is
money. Since he had no
oil, he would drill for
money. Mohammed Al-Maktoum's
failing has been his
belief that megalomania
is best when done big.
He built a giant port
and a giant airport, a
giant stock exchange,
giant finance sector and
giant shopping mall.
Dubai is a monument to
big-must-be-beautiful. During the gold rush
the prospectors came.
But as the rush wanes,
Dubai is believed to be
nursing the world's
biggest per-capita debt.
It may have to be bailed
out by its neighbouring
Gulf states, whose more
prudent attractions
Dubai tried to outshine;
indeed, the process has
already begun. Nothing can bail out
a tower if there is
nobody to live in it. It
cannot be pulled down
and Chipping Camden
replicated on the spot.
The same goes for
thousands of villas and
apartment blocks along
the Gulf shore and on
the artificial islands
in the world's most
boring sea. They will
stand empty in the heat.
Most were bought as
investments. The value
of those investments has
fallen an estimated 60%
in just six months. If
their emptiness reaches
a tipping point where
there are no neighbours,
no shops, no services
and no social life, they
will decay, like
downtown Detroit. Smart money says
Dubai could survive as
the playground of India,
even if the oil money of
the Middle East moves
back to more salubrious
Europe. This depends on
India failing to supply
its own playground and,
critically, on Dubai
surviving what could be
a Muslim backlash
against its hesitantly
hedonistic western
lifestyle. Rivals such
as Dohar, Abu Dhabi and
Bahrain - especially as
they are now bailing out
Dubai - may welcome its
swift return to the
desert ecology. Just as visitors to
the Middle East see
half-built, mostly
abandoned concrete
housing blocks and
barracks littering the
landscape of Syria and
Jordan, so the towers of
Dubai will become
casualties not of human
greed but of
architectural folly.
Their lifts and
services, expensive to
maintain, will collapse.
Their colossal facades
will shed glass. Sand
will drift round their
trunkless legs. Animals
will inhabit their
basements. Thousands of
residential properties,
if occupied at all, will
be squatted by a
migratory poor, like the
hotel towers of the
Spanish littoral or
Corbusier's blockhouses
of Chandigarh in India.
Refugees will colonise
the camps where Indian
workers have lived as
they built Dubai. Gangs
will seize the gated
estates and random
anarchy will rule the
soulless boulevards. If it is lucky Dubai
will at least be a
refuge from the
political cataclysms
that could engulf
countries such as
Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and
Saudi Arabia. But mostly
the dunes will reclaim
the place. In centuries
to come, tourists will
share with Ozymandias
the message: "Look on my
works ye mighty and
despair." With Shelley
they will see how,
"round the decay /Of
that colossal wreck,
boundless and bare /The
lone and level sands
stretch far away." |
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NEW
EXTENSION TO BRITISH MUSEUM |
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The British Museum
is planning to build a
£135million extension to display
blockbuster exhibitions, the
Evening Standard has learned.
Under designs drawn up by Lord
Rogers's architecture firm, the
museum will build three
pavilions on seven levels. This
will create 1,100 square metres
of gallery space to hold shows
such as
China's
First Emperor and Hadrian's
Empire And Conflict. |
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BANK OF ENGLAND PUMPS £75
BILLION OF 'BANKSY'
MONEY INTO UK ECONOMY |
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The Bank of England is set this week to
begin “printing money” in a
ground-breaking move that will mark its
most forceful action yet to curb the
slump in the economy. The Bank’s
Monetary Policy Committee is expected to
act on Thursday, as soon as it is given
a final green light from Alistair
Darling to begin the so-called
quantitative easing. The go-ahead from
the Chancellor is expected imminently,
as early as tomorrow, in a letter to Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor. The
move will signal an aggressive stepping
up of the Bank’s efforts to breathe life
into the economy. The radical measure
will also mark a watershed in the Bank’s
history since it was handed independent
control of interest rates by Gordon
Brown nearly 12 years ago. Until
recently, that was seen unquestionably
as Mr Brown’s masterstroke. On a bright
morning on May 6, 1997, the man who was
then Chancellor announced that he was
surrendering to the Bank his power to
set base rates. |
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BEACHED WHALES |
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Conservationists
are demanding an immediate and thorough
inquiry into what they say is the
suspicious stranding of 200 whales and
dolphins. Fears that the mass stranding
on an Australian beach on Sunday was
caused by human disturbance were raised
because two species of cetacean came
ashore simultaneously. Most of the
animals were pilot whales, but a number
of bottlenose dolphins were also among
the pod. Residents joined wildlife
workers to spend hours keeping the
surviving animals wet and cool before
they could be lifted, pushed and hauled
back into the water. The rescue
operation succeeded in saving 54 pilot
whales and five dolphins on Naracoopa
Beach on King Island, Tasmania. Most of
the beached animals were dead by the
time anyone could reach them. Wildlife
workers and volunteers were delighted to
have saved more than a quarter of the
whales and dolphins, but they were
maintaining a watch on beaches in the
area for fear that some of the creatures
might come ashore again during the next
high tides. |
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HELP THOSE IN NEED IN
AFRICA
Since food prices began to rise
100 million more people have been pushed into poverty,
according to the World Bank, with as many as two billion
on the verge of disaster. Almost half the world's
population, let's remember, live on less than $2.50 per
day. Millions die annually of hunger and starvation, and
more than a billion do not have access to fresh water. |
GIVE GENEROUSLY - DIRECTLY TO
THESE CHARITIES With the world financial crisis
these numbers are poised to rise dramatically with
population growth, dwindling natural resources and
higher consumer prices across all goods and services. So
as the stock market tumbles and the world economy
falters, it's important to remember that it's more than
financial losses we are talking about, it's the loss of
life. |
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