Camille Parmesan is a conservation biologist, an expert on butterflies – and she has the gentle, unhurried disposition that comes from living in a tent for weeks at a time, studying the breeding cycles of insects and animals in their native habitats. Yet there is a hardness in her voice, a sense of urgency, whenever she talks about global warming and its effect on the planet. ‘We’re definitely seeing species going extinct because of climate change,’ says Parmesan, sitting in her second-floor biology office at the University of Texas, which overlooks the turtle ponds north of the UT Tower. ‘We’re going to lose the penguins. We’re going to lose the polar bears, no question. . . . I’m seeing high mountain butterflies literally being pushed off the mountains. This is happening. It is not theory. It is not people saying, ‘Oh, we think it might happen.’ It is happening, and it is incredibly depressing.’ Parmesan has been talking this way for almost a decade now – on ABC’s ‘Nightline,’ in magazines such as Nature and National Geographic, in major scientific papers and in public lectures, long before the recent surge of global warming stories in American media. Her […]
Every movement has its seminal moment-when an insight patently obvious in retrospect begins to come clearly into focus. Prisoner re-entry guru Jeremy Travis places his moment in 1999. He was then director of the National Institute of Justice, and his boss, Attorney General Janet Reno, asked a simple question: ‘What are we doing about all the people coming out of prison?’ No one had a clue. The search for answers subsequently spawned a host of initiatives that may fundamentally alter how society deals with people who have served time. The issue is hardly trivial. On any given day, America locks down some 2.3 million people. And almost all eventually get out. Some 656,000 or so emerge every year; about two thirds of them end up behind bars again. Edward Davis, the top cop in Lowell, Mass., found that scenario profoundly disturbing and resolved to try to change it-at least for Lowell, which ‘hit the skids,’ he says, in the mid-’90s. Crime had risen dramatically, and Davis saw no prospect of ‘locking-up our way out of the problem.’ So the police department adopted a new approach-which entailed visiting each prisoner upon his or her release. The cops delivered a […]
A Food and Drug Administration statement on Thursday denying any medical benefits of marijuana reinforced the divide between federal officials and the states that have approved the drug’s use to ease some medical conditions. ‘It’s consistent with the long-held federal view on this medicine, and that is that marijuana is the equivalent of heroin and cocaine,’ said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for California’s attorney general, Bill Lockyer. ‘California voters disagree.’ State officials said the announcement would not affect their laws. But they and federal officials said it clarified the federal government’s intention to continue enforcing its laws against marijuana, even in states that allow it for medical purposes. ‘It’s a very good statement so that people can clearly see what the policy of the United States government is,’ said Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. While it has always been the drug enforcement agency’s policy to enforce laws against marijuana, Ms. Waite said, ‘now it’s clearly out there, so that people don’t have to look everywhere to figure this out.’ Several officials in the 11 states that allow medical marijuana disputed the F.D.A.’s contention that there was no research supporting the drug’s […]
Congressional leaders yesterday planned to ask President Bush to order investigations into possible price gouging by oil companies as crude oil prices hit new highs on world markets and average gasoline prices in the nation’s capital blew through the $3-a-gallon mark. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) are preparing to send a letter to the president Monday asking him to direct the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department to investigate alleged price gouging and instruct the Environmental Protection Agency to issue waivers that might make it easier for oil refiners to produce adequate gasoline supplies, Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said. Hastert and Frist’s letter comes amid charges by some consumer groups and Democrats that oil companies have manipulated refineries and oil inventories to drive up prices. Hastert also took aim at the rich pay package for Exxon Mobil Corp.’s retired chief executive, which he called ‘unconscionable.’ Yesterday, oil prices climbed to a new record, unadjusted for inflation, with benchmark crude rising $1.48 to settle at $75.17 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Average gasoline prices in the District reached $3.02 a gallon, up 3 cents from the day […]
CAIRO, Egypt — Um Sami and her family left their home in one of Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhoods after her children and husband were harassed. The Shiite family went first to a more mixed Baghdad neighborhood, then to Jordan, and finally a week later to Cairo. The veiled woman said her family was not comfortable in Egypt, but escaping Baghdad was a must. ‘Our life was a disaster. We could not take it anymore,’ she said. Since the bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Iraq in late February, such stories of sectarian intimidation and fleeing have become common. Within Iraq, thousands are on the move as death threats drive them to neighborhoods where their sect has more strength, international and Iraqi officials say. Reprisal killings between Shiite and Sunni extremists have sharply increased since the shrine bombing, and the bodies of civilian victims often turn up in the streets of Baghdad. An estimated 40,000 people have been internally displaced in Iraq since the blast, said Jean Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration. Iraqi officials put the number at 65,000, an official in the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
