TIKSI, Russia Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle. In Bykovsky, a village of 457 on Russia’s northeast coast, the shoreline is collapsing, creeping closer and closer to houses and tanks of heating oil, at a rate of 15 to 18 feet a year. Eventually, homes will be lost, and maybe all of Bykovsky, too, under ever-longer periods of assault by open water. “It is eating up the land,” said Innokenty Koryakin, a member of the Evenk tribe and the captain of a fishing boat. “You cannot do anything about it.” To the east, Fyodor V. Sellyakhov scours a barren island with 16 hired men. Mammoths lived here tens of thousands of years ago, and their carcasses eventually sank deep into sediment that is now offering up a trove of tusks and bones nearly as valuable as elephant ivory. Mr. Sellyakhov, a native Yakut, hauls the fossils to a warehouse here and sells them for $25 to $50 a pound. This summer he collected two tons, making him a wealthy man, for Tiksi. “The sea washes down the coast every year,” he said. “It is practically all […]
SAN FRANCISCO — Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country’s free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet’s fastest growing market. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to roll out a new version of its search engine bearing China’s Web suffix “.cn,” on Wednesday. A Chinese-language version of Google’s search engine has previously been available through the company’s dot-com address in the United States. By creating a unique address for China, Google hopes to make its search engine more widely available and easier to use in the world’s most populous country. Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google’s China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time. The service troubles have frustrated many Chinese users, hobbling Google’s efforts to expand its market share in a country that expected to emerge as an Internet gold mine over the next decade. China already has more than 100 million Web surfers and the audience is expected to swell substantially _ an alluring prospect for Google as it tries to boost its already rapidly […]
WASHINGTON – At the adult entertainment industry’s equivalent of the Oscars in Las Vegas this month, comedian-host Greg Fitzsimmons zeroed in on the entrenched relationship between the Internet and pornography. “The Internet was completely funded by porn,” he said from the stage of the 23rd annual AVN Awards show. And if it wasn’t for the Internet, he added, “you guys would be completely out of business.” The audience, packed with porn actors and adult entertainment moguls like Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt, roared with laughter. This week, the Justice Department said it subpoenaed four major Internet companies in an effort to crack down on children’s access to porn. The government asked Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to turn over every query typed into its popular search engine over the course of one week. Google has said it will resist the demand. The standoff has resonated in the online world not only because of its privacy implications, but because it goes to the heart of what has spurred the Internet to such prodigious growth. Online pornography, a $2.5 billion business and growing rapidly, pioneered such now-commonplace practices as streaming video, trading files and making online purchases. By comparison, sales […]
The Palestinians’ Islamist movement, Hamas, is set to do well in next week’s parliamentary election. Will that hurt or help prospects for peace? WITH less than a week to go, the reality has sunk in. Every attempt to contain Hamas has had the opposite effect. When Palestinians elect a parliament on January 25th, for the first time in a decade, they are expected to give the Islamist movement a good proportion of seats, in a resounding protest vote against the failures of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling Fatah party, and against Israel. According to a poll published last week by Birzeit University, the Change and Reform partythe banner under which Hamas has fielded its candidates for the 132 seats in the legislative councilwould get 30% of the national vote, against Fatah’s 35%, the narrowest gap seen so far. That looks like the voters’ answer to Fatah’s infighting over candidacies, which produced a split in the party in December and ended in an untidy compromise between the warring factions: a list designed to soothe as many warring egos as possible instead of attracting as many voters as possible. Moreover, the poll may underestimate Hamas’s strength, since […]
My apologies that you have not received SR for two days. I am in France, and have been suffering from pneumonia for the past week. On top of which I could not think clearly enough to figure out how to work through the incredible process it takes where I am staying to get online. I am mending now and return to the U.S. Tuesday.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
