ST. PETERSBURG — Russian president Vladimir Putin called on Sunday for a radical overhaul of the world’s financial and trade institutions to reflect the growing economic power of emerging market countries – including Russia. Mr Putin said the world needed to create a new international financial architecture to replace an existing model that had become ‘archaic, undemocratic and unwieldy’. His apparent challenge to western dominance of the world economic order came at a forum in St Petersburg designed to showcase the country’s economic recovery. Among 6,000 delegates at the biggest business forum ever held in post-Soviet Russia were scores of international chief executives including heads of Deutsche Bank, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Nestlé, Chevron, Siemens and Coca-Cola. Business deals worth more than $4bn were signed at the conference – including an order by Aeroflot for Boeing jets – as executives said they were continuing to invest in Russia despite deteriorating relations with the west. Mr Putin’s hosting of the forum capped a week in which he dominated the international stage. He warned last Monday that Russia might target nuclear missiles at Europe if the US built a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, then […]
The U.S. scientist who cracked the human genome is poised to create the world’s first man-made species, a synthetic microbe that could lead to an endless supply of biofuel. Craig Venter has applied for a patent at more than 100 national offices to make a bacterium from laboratory-made DNA. It is part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases. DNA contains the instructions to make the proteins that build and run an organism. The J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is applying for worldwide patents on what it refers to as Mycoplasma laboratorium based on DNA assembled by scientists. When asked whether the world’s first synthetic bug was thriving in a test tube, Dr Venter said: ‘We are getting close.’ The Venter Institute’s US Patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic ‘free-living organism that can grow and replicate’ that is made using those genes. To create the synthetic organism his team is making snippets of DNA, known as oligonucleotides or ‘oligos’, of up to 100 letters of DNA. To build […]
Fossilized dinosaurs often have wide-open mouths, heads thrown back and tails that curve toward the head. Paleontologists have long assumed the dinosaurs died in water and the currents drifted the bones into that position, or that rigor mortis or drying muscles, tendons and ligaments contorted the limbs. ‘I’m reading this in the literature and thinking, ‘This doesn’t make any sense to me as a veterinarian,” said Cynthia Marshall Faux, a veterinarian-turned-paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies. Faux and a colleague say brain damage and asphyxiation are the more likely culprits. A classic example of the posture, which has puzzled paleontologists for ages, is the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, the first-known example of a feathered dinosaur and the proposed link between dinosaurs and present-day birds. ‘Virtually all articulated specimens of Archaeopteryx are in this posture, exhibiting a classic pose of head thrown back, jaws open, back and tail reflexed backward and limbs contracted,’ said Kevin Padian, professor of integrative biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. He Faux (pronounced ‘Fox’) published their findings this week in the journal Paleobiology. Some animals found in this posture may have suffocated in ash […]
WASHINGTON, Mich. — The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it. Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same. ‘These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,’ Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill. ‘In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,’ she said of the measure. Supporters of the legislation defended it as an imperfect but pragmatic solution to the difficult problem of illegal immigration. Public opinion polls, including a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last month, showed broad support among Americans for the bill’s major provisions. But the legislation sparked a furious rebellion among many Republican and even some Democratic voters, who were linked by […]
Omar, a Sunni driver, lived in a pleasant house in a Shia neighbourhood of al-Jihad district in west Baghdad until he decided that it was too dangerous for his family to stay. He moved with them to Damascus, but it was too expensive and he had no chance of getting a job. He returned to his home in al-Jihad, but when he arrived his neighbours said that the Mahdi Army Shia militia had left a message for him. It said that if he ever re-occupied the house, they would kill him. Omar moved to the supposedly safer Sunni district of al-Khadra, but now he faces another problem. Al-Qa’ida insurgents are demanding that he join them on nightly patrols. First they asked him politely to meet their emir or local leader. Later, when he failed to do so, they became more menacing. They said: ‘Either you come with us or you will have to leave here. We suspect that you are not a Sunni, because a real Sunni would not hesitate to join the jihad.’ Across Iraq, millions of people are looking for safer places to live, and not finding them. The United Nations High […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
