The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect. The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today. “These studies are revolutionary,” said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. “They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.” The study, published in today’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, was not just an ordinary study, said Dr. Michael Thun, who directs epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. It was so large and so expensive, Dr. Thun said, that it was “the Rolls-Royce of studies.” As such, he added, it is likely […]
HOUSTON — Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, will continue to bolster its output capacity to quell global shortages, but has “concerns” about the Bush administration’s call to cut its addiction to Middle East oil, the kingdom’s petroleum minister said on Tuesday. Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, plans to boost production capacity from 11 million barrels per day to 12.5 million bpd by 2009. “We will continue to be a source of stability for world energy markets,” Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi told an energy conference hosted by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “We are addressing the problem of availability head-on.” But, when asked if there were plans to boost capacity beyond 12.5 million bpd, Naimi made a reference to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union pledge to slash U.S. oil imports from Middle East suppliers by 75 percent by 2025. “What concerns us is all the talk about not wanting our oil,” Naimi said. “It’s not a major bump; it’s something to take into consideration.” Speaking on U.S. soil about Bush’s comments, Naimi had to walk a delicate line. His speaker’s podium at […]
HOUSTON — The United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp. executive said on Tuesday. “Realistically, it is simply not feasible in any time period relevant to our discussion today,” Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Stuart McGill said, referring to what he called the “misperception” that the United States can achieve energy independence. The comments, in a speech at an energy conference in Houston, come a few days after U.S. President George W. Bush declared America was addicted to Middle Eastern oil and promised to help the country kick the habit. Many in the United States believe America should wean itself off oil imports from the Middle East, fearing it makes the country dangerously dependent on an unstable region. The world’s largest publicly traded oil company, however, says hoping to end foreign oil imports is not only a bad idea, but also impossible. “Americans depend upon imports to fill the gap,” McGill said. “No combination of conservation measures, alternative energy sources and technological advances could realistically and economically provide a way to completely replace […]
An astonishing mist-shrouded “lost world” of previously unknown and rare animals and plants high in the mountain rainforests of New Guinea has been uncovered by an international team of scientists. Among the new species of birds, frogs, butterflies and palms discovered in the expedition through this pristine environment, untouched by man, was the spectacular Berlepsch’s six-wired bird of paradise. The scientists are the first outsiders to see it. They could only reach the remote mountainous area by helicopter, which they described it as akin to finding a “Garden of Eden”. In a jungle camp site, surrounded by giant flowers and unknown plants, the researchers watched rare bowerbirds perform elaborate courtship rituals. The surrounding forest was full of strange mammals, such as tree kangaroos and spiny anteaters, which appeared totally unafraid, suggesting no previous contact with humans. Bruce Beehler, of the American group Conservation International, who led the month-long expedition last November and December, said: “It is as close to the Garden of Eden as you’re going to find on Earth. We found dozens, if not hundreds, of new species in what is probably the most pristine ecosystem in the whole Asian-Pacific region. There were so many new […]
Donald Richie has been living in Japan for half a century. The American writer, translator and film scholar has spent most of that time explaining Japan to the English-speaking world. But lately he’s found himself, somewhat disconcertingly, in an entirely new roleas an interpreter of Japan to the Japanese. The Tokyo university students who attend his lectures on the great postwar filmmaker Yasujiro Ozuno longer understand the world portrayed in the 1953 classic “Tokyo Story.” They don’t know anything about the family system because the family system doesn’t exist anymore,” says Richie. “So I have to reconstruct it for them.” They can still understand the traditional, intricately polite version of Japanese used in the movies, but that language sounds alien, as if it comes from a “vanished” world, he says. Vanished. That word crops up often in Japan these days. Before my family and I arrived here in September 2004, we weren’t really sure what to expect. My head was filled with lingering images from the Japan-bashing 1980s, and Japan was still widely cast in the West as unique and alien. I wondered whether we could expect a land clinging to its differences: its lifetime employment, its company […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
