It’s Thursday, and that means it’s time for the Public Eye Chat. This week’s subject is Rome-based CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey. You can read excerpts, and listen to the full interview, below. Brian Montopoli: You’ve got a lot of experience covering Africa, even before you came to CBS. Are Africa’s stories getting told in Western media? Allen Pizzey: No, I don’t think they are – I think we ignore Africa to a large extent. The only crisis that really gets any attention is the crisis in Darfur, and I don’t think we have enough people going there. It’s all basically a lot of second hand information. Somalia – you can’t cover Somalia. It’s simply too dangerous for somebody to go. But there are a lot of stories in Africa that ought to be covered. Zimbabwe is a catastrophe in the making, and no one’s paying a lot of attention, partly because Mugabe won’t let people in there. But also because people simply say, ‘well, you can’t go,’ so we don’t go, so we ignore it. And then there’s the whole West Africa Nigeria crisis. For example, the Niger delta supplies a fairly large percentage of […]
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Only a few years ago, oil from palm trees was viewed as an ideal biofuel: a cheap, renewable alternative to petroleum that would fight global warming. Energy companies began converting generators and production soared. Now, it’s increasingly seen as an example of how well-meaning efforts to limit climate-changing carbon emissions may backfire. Marcel Silvius, a climate expert at Wetlands International in the Netherlands, led a team that compared the benefits of palm oil to the ecological harm from destroying virgin Asian rain forests to develop lucrative new plantations. His conclusion: ‘As a biofuel, it’s a failure.” Scientists and policymakers from more than 100 countries are meeting in Brussels, Belgium, starting Monday to report on the impact of global warming, including storms, flooding and the extinction of plants and animals. Then in May, the group intends to issue recommendations on how best to fight it, through new technologies and possible use of alternatives. The lessons of palm oil are sure to figure into their discussion. Long a primary ingredient in food and cosmetics, palm oil derivatives caught on about five years ago as a source of renewable energy, spurred by subsidies in […]
Cancer cases will more than double between 2000 and 2030, primarily in poor countries, an international expert says. World bodies like the United Nations and World Health Organisation need to develop a coordinated strategy to confront the rising cancer risk, said Peter Boyle, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The incidence of cancer, once considered a disease of the developed world, has increased in poorer countries and global policymakers are not keeping pace with the challenge, he said. When the research agency was founded in 1965, cancer was considered a disease that afflicted wealthy nations. That changed with the growth and aging of the population in poorer countries, which also imported more risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity and the lack of physical activity, Boyle said. ‘The cancer control community worldwide has suffered from being very diverse, loose and uncoordinated, and it certainly could do with a lot of leadership and an overall coordinated strategy,’ Boyle told a news conference at United Nations. ‘That should come from organisations which are in place to do that.’ Boyle’s agency is part of the World Health Organisation. In Africa, the […]
See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses – and build a few new ones. For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads – the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly. ‘It was slightly strange at first,’ Wächter says, ‘though on the bike, it was great.’ He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. ‘I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,’ he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, ‘I suddenly realized that my […]
MOSCOW — The days of their Cold War may have passed, but Russia and the United States are in the midst of another battle – this one a technological fight over the future of America’s Global Positioning System, or GPS. By the end of the year, the authorities here say, the Russian space agency plans to launch eight navigation satellites that would nearly complete the country’s own system, called Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System. The system is expected to begin operating over Russian territory and parts of Europe and Asia before going global in 2009. Nor is Russia the only country trying to break the American monopoly on navigation technology. China has already sent up two satellites to create its own system, called Baidu, for the Chinese word for the Big Dipper. Work on the European Union’s rival system, Galileo, has been halted because of doubts among the private contractors over its potential for profitability. The Russian system is furthest along, paid for with government oil profits. The technological battle is being driven, in part, by the potential new uses for satellite navigation, best known for providing directions to drivers. Business sectors as disparate as […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
