LAGOS, Nigeria — A growing water and sanitation crisis cause nearly two million child deaths every year in Africa and other developing countries, a report by the United Nations in 2006 has said. The report is captioned by the Human development group as ‘Beyond scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water scarcity’, cuts across most of the developing world, especially Africa. ‘Across much of the developing world, unclean water is an immeasurably greater threat to human security than violent conflict. Each year, the authors report, 1.8 million children die from diarrhoea diseases that could be prevented with access to clean water and a toilet; 443 million school days are lost to water-related illnesses; and almost 50 percent of all people in developing countries are suffering at any given time from at least one health problem caused by a lack of water and sanitation. In addition to direct human suffering, the crisis in water and sanitation holds back economic growth, with sub-Saharan Africa losing five percent of gross domestic product (GDP) annually, far more than the region receives in aid,’ the Human development group stated. The report released through the United States embassy in Abuja, also states in […]
WASHINGTON, DC — ExxonMobil has adopted the tobacco industry’s disinformation tactics to cloud the scientific understanding of climate change and delay action on the issue, the Union of Concerned Scientists claims in a new report published Wednesday. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded corporation, responded Thursday by calling the Union of Concerned Scientists’ paper ‘deeply offensive and wrong.’ Tillerson Rex Tillerson is chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. (Photo courtesy ExxonMobil) ‘ExxonMobil engages in public policy discussions by encouraging serious inquiry, analysis, the sharing of information and transparency,’ the company said in a statement. According to the report, between 1998 and 2005 ExxonMobil ‘directed nearly $16 million to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science.’ ‘ExxonMobil has manufactured uncertainty about the human causes of global warming just as tobacco companies denied their product caused lung cancer,’ said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a 200,000 member organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ‘A modest but effective investment has allowed the oil giant to fuel doubt about global warming to delay government action just as Big Tobacco did for over 40 […]
BRUSSELS — Chilly northern Europe could reap big benefits from global warming, while the Mediterranean faces crippling shortages of both water and tourists by the middle of the century, according to the first comprehensive study of its effects on the continent. Fewer in the north would die of cold, crops there would boom and the North Sea coast could become the new Riviera, an analysis to be approved by the European Commission next week shows. But the annual migration of rich northern Europeans to the south could stop – with dramatic consequences for the economies of Spain, Greece and Italy. A sixth of the world’s tourists – 100m people annually – head south within Europe for their holidays, spreading €100bn ($130bn) of largesse with them. ‘The more tourists stay home or go to other destinations, the larger the distributional impact in Europe will be,’ says the paper, a copy of which has been obtained by the Financial Times. While fewer people will perish of cold in the north, tens of thousands more will die of heat in the south. As many as 87,000 extra deaths a year would occur annually by 2071, assuming a three degree centigrade […]
Prayer might not cure cancer, but it makes some cancer patients feel psychologically better, new research claims. Transcripts of online support group sessions for 97 breast cancer patients were analyzed, and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found an association between improved mental health and patients who used a higher percentage of words such as pray, worship, faith, holy, and God during those sessions. (Interviews with the patients later on showed that those who use these words were engaging directly in prayer, not just sprinkling those words in their dialogues.) The association held even when the researchers compared patients with similar levels of religious beliefs. The study did not select for patients of any particular religion, but participants expressed mainly Christian beliefs, although there were a few Native American and Hindu religious quotes in the transcripts. All in the mind Patients in the study filled out a survey before participating in the online support sessions and then another one four months later to assess psychological changes. A text analysis program run on the session transcripts revealed that those who used more of the words suggestive of religious beliefs and practices had higher levels of functional […]
A survey by researchers at Villanova University has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church money in the last five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen. The Catholic Church has some of the most rigorous financial guidelines of any denomination, specialists in church ethics said, but the survey found that the guidelines were often ignored in parishes. And when no one is looking, the cash that goes into the collection plate does not always get deposited into the church’s bank account. ‘As a faith-based organization, we place a lot of trust in our folks,’ said Chuck Zech, a co-author of the study and director of the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova. ‘We think if you work for a church – you’re a volunteer or a priest – the last thing on your mind is to do something dishonest,’ Mr. Zech said. ‘But people are people, and there’s a lot of temptation there, and with the cash-based aspect of how churches operate, it’s pretty easy.’ Specialists in church ethics said they believed this was the first study to assess […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
