WASHINGTON — Despite persistent disillusionment with the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans supports taking military action against Iran if that country continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found. The poll, conducted Sunday through Wednesday, found that 57% of Americans favor military intervention if Iran’s Islamic government pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms. Support for military action against Tehran has increased over the last year, the poll found, even though public sentiment is running against the war in neighboring Iraq: 53% said they believe the situation there was not worth going to war. The poll results suggest that the difficulties the United States has encountered in Iraq have not turned the public against the possibility of military actions elsewhere in the Middle East.Bush ratings sink in latest poll Support for a potential military confrontation with Iran was strongest among Republican respondents, among whom 76% endorsed the idea. But even among Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war in Iraq, 49% supported such action. In follow-up interviews, some respondents said they believed Iran posed a more serious threat than […]
BANGKOK, Thailand — China’s skies have darkened over the past 50 years, possibly due to haze resulting from a nine-fold increase in fossil fuel emissions, according to researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy. The researchers, writing in this month’s edition of Geophysical Research Letters, found that the amount of solar radiation measured at more than 500 stations in China fell from 1954 to 2001 despite a decrease in cloud cover. “Normally, more frequent cloud-free days should be sunnier and brighter but this doesn’t happen in our study,” said Yun Qian of the energy department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. “The pollution (that) resulted from human activity may have created a haze which absorbs and deflects the sun’s rays,” Qian, the study’s lead author, said in an e-mail interview Friday. Air pollution is widespread in China. Antiquated factories billow smoke, many residents still use coal to heat their centuries-old houses, and a sharp increase in car ownership has bathed the motorways in exhaust fumes. Using data from more than 500 weather stations in China, researchers found the amount of sunlight hitting the ground has fallen by 3.7 watts per square yard in each […]
WASHINGTON – Palestinian voters availed themselves of the time- honored democratic right to “throw the bums out” in their first legislative elections in a decade Wednesday – exactly the kind of action implicit in President Bush’s push for democracy in the Middle East. But by snubbing the Fatah Party of US-supported Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in favor of the radical Islamist group Hamas, Palestinians also put the Bush administration in a difficult spot. The US might now seem hypocritical to many Arabs – encouraging democracy in the Middle East, while rejecting the choices that result from its exercise. At the same time, questions mount over whether Mr. Bush’s campaign for democracy is encouraging the empowerment of Islamist militants across the region. “This [election result] is really going to scare … other governments in the region, and the Egyptians in particular are going to tell the US, ‘We told you so,’ ” says Arthur Hughes, a former deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs. “They’ll see this as more evidence of what comes from our pressure to open up their societies, but they won’t acknowledge that their hard-line tactics are what are leading to the growth” […]
ALBANY, N.Y. — The disparity between rich and poor is growing in America as the federal minimum wage has remained flat for years, union membership has declined and industries have faced global competition, according to a study released Thursday. The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, both liberal-leaning think tanks, found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said. Families in the middle fifth saw their incomes rise 28 percent, or $10,218. The figures, based on U.S. Census data, compare the average growth from 1980-82 to 2001-03, after adjusting for inflation. The poorest one-fifth of families, the report said, had an average income of $16,780 from 2000-03, while the top fifth of families had an average income of $122,150 – more than seven times as much. Middle-income families’ average income was $46,875. Trudi Renwick, an economist with the union-backed Fiscal Policy Institute in New York, said globalization, the […]
LONDON – Scientists have solved the genetic puzzle of how influenza A viruses – including the H5N1 bird flu – replicate inside cells, which could help to speed up the development of new drugs to avert a pandemic. As governments bolster efforts to halt the spread of avian flu which has killed 83 people since 2003, an international team of researchers has discovered that the flu virus infects cells by organizing its genetic material in a set of eight segments. “We’ve found that the influenza virus has a specific mechanism that permits it to package its genetic materials,” said Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka, of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, who headed the research team. “All influenza viruses have the same mechanism, including bird flu,” he added in an interview on Wednesday. Influenza A is the family of viruses responsible for seasonal flu as well pandemic strains such as the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide. Scientists fear H5N1 could cause the next pandemic if it mutates on its own or mixes with a human virus to form a strain that can spread easily from person to person. So far […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
