BEIJING — For years, China has chafed at efforts by the United States to exclude it from full membership in the world’s elite space club. So, lately, China seems to have hit on a solution: create a new club. Beijing is trying to position itself as a space benefactor to the developing world – the same countries, in some cases, whose natural resources China covets here on Earth. The latest, and most prominent, example came last week when China launched a communications satellite for Nigeria in a project that serves as a tidy case study of how space has become another arena where China is trying to exert its soft power. Not only did China design, build and launch the satellite for oil-rich Nigeria – it also provided a huge loan to help pay the bill. China has also signed a satellite contract with another major oil supplier, Venezuela. It is developing an earth observation satellite system with Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand. And it has organized a satellite association in Asia. For China, the strategy is a blend of self-interest, broader diplomacy and, from a business standpoint, an effective way to break into […]
The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Today, Martin Asser looks at the central issue of water. The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land – and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land. The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute – moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel’s main source of drinking water. Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water. A country needs water to survive and develop. In Israel’s history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants. Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants. In addition to their sheer numbers, citizens of the new state were intent on conducting water-intensive commercial agricultural such as growing bananas […]
GENEVA — Dozens of European mammals, including the Iberian lynx, the Saiga antelope and the Mediterranean monk seal, face extinction unless immediate measures are taken to protect them, a conservation group said Tuesday. Thirty-five of the continent’s 231 mammal species fall into the threatened category, according to a report published by the World Conservation Union. The 60-page report commissioned by the European Union warns that 27 percent of mammal species show a fall in numbers, compared with 8 percent that are increasing. The report’s nine categories include ‘least concern,’ ‘vulnerable,’ ‘endangered’ and ‘extinct.’ The group said historical evidence shows two European land mammals – a rabbit-like creature called the Sardinian pika and the aurochs, an ancestor to domestic cattle species – have been driven to extinction in the last 500 years, while the gray whale has disappeared from European waters. The five most critically endangered European mammals – the saiga antelope, Mediterranean monk seal, North Atlantic right whale, Bavarian pine vole and Iberian lynx – could soon follow, the report said. There are only two small populations of Iberian lynx in Spain today, totaling about 150, and the number of Mediterranean monk seals has shrunk […]
Unlike Muslim minorities in many European countries, U.S. Muslims are highly assimilated, close to parity with other Americans in income and overwhelmingly opposed to Islamic extremism, according to the first major, nationwide random survey of Muslims. The survey by the Pew Research Center found that 78 percent of U.S. Muslims said the use of suicide bombings against civilian targets to defend Islam is never justified. But 5 percent said it is justified ‘rarely,’ 7 percent said ‘sometimes,’ and 1 percent said ‘often’; the remaining 9 percent said they did not know or declined to answer. By comparison, Muslims in France, Spain and Britain were almost twice as likely to say suicide bombing is sometimes or often justified, and public acceptance of the tactic is even higher in some countries with large Muslim populations, such as Nigeria, Jordan and Egypt. Titled ‘Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,’ the Pew report draws a picture of a diverse population of about 2.35 million U.S. Muslims, of which two-thirds of the adults were born abroad, and which has a generally positive view of the larger society. Most call their communities good or excellent places to live, and most report […]
WASHINGTON — Members of Congress demÂanded on Tuesday that the Bush administration explain how billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money had gone missing in Iraq in what they called a disastrous effort to rebuild the country. Responding to the latest report by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, members of the House foreign relations committee also directed much of their criticism at the Iraqi coalition government, venting their frustration with corruption. ‘It is simply outrageous that we are mired in the same mud of incompetence that we got stuck in last year and the year before that. But knowing the administration’s abysmal track record on Iraq reconstruction planning, this is no surprise,’ Tom Lantos, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said. Iraq was losing perhaps $5bn (€3.7bn, £2.5bn) a year through corruption, he said. ‘The revelation in Mr Bowen’s latest quarterly report that new facilities are crumbling is equally as troubling as the data on incomplete projects. Some of the supposedly completed ventures are actually houses of cards, ready to collapse.’ Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the senior Republican on the committee, focused on training Iraq’s security forces, including high rates of absenteeism, ‘inadequate vetting mechanisms to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
