Are you looking to fall for someone tall, dark - but most importantly - very wealthy? Marlys Harris, Money Magazine Senior Editor, explains what it takes to snag your very own Richie Rich: Work hard, take risks, maybe build your own business. That’s the traditional route to financial success. Of course, there’s another highly traditional path to acquiring wealth that isn’t talked about quite as much these days: Marry money. Real money. As in not a mere millionaire (a dime a dozen these days) but an honest-to-goodness billionaire – make that 10 figures after the dollar sign, please. True, it’s not politically correct to go hunting for a marital meal ticket (or for that matter, to write about it). But just for a moment imagine the life that could be yours if you did. Forget the fabulous baubles, designer clothing, cutting-edge electronics and palatial mansions that your golden goose – uh, spouse – might heap upon you. Consider the more pragmatic bonuses of the good life. No more scrimping and scraping to make your annual Roth IRA contribution. No more working until you drop to ensure a comfortable retirement. And no more worries about […]
The sons of Hillary and Tenzing speak out about climate change: ‘Believe us, it’s a reality’ Fifty-four years after Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to scale Everest, their sons have said the mountain is now so ravaged by climate change that they would no longer recognise it. On the eve of the Live Earth concerts this weekend, Peter Hillary and Jamling Tenzing yesterday issued a timely warning that global warming is rapidly changing the face of the world’s highest mountain and threatening the survival of billions of people who rely on its glaciers for drinking water. The base camp where Sir Edmund and Norgay began their ascent is 40 metres lower than it was in 1953. The glacier on which it stands, and those around it, are melting at such a rate that scientists believe the mountain, whose Nepalese name, Qomolangma, means Mother of the World, could be barren rock by 2050. Up to 40,000 Sherpas who live at the base of the Himalayas face devastation if vast new lakes formed by the melted ice burst and send a torrent of millions of tons of water down the slopes. Mr […]
WASHINGTON — One war appears to be going well for the United States and its allies these days: the drug war. The availability of all major illegal drugs except Afghan heroin is flat or down, according to newly released global figures. So is drug use in the United States, the world’s leading consumer. And drug seizures are up sharply. No one’s saying the world’s drug problem is solved, only that it’s contained for now. ‘We seem to have reached a point where the world drug situation has stabilized and been brought under control,’ Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, based in Vienna, Austria, wrote in an analysis of world drug trends that was released last week. Some experts chide Costa as reading too much into admittedly small fluctuations in short-term supply and ignoring grimmer long-term forecasts. But U.S. drug czar John Walters, the director of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Policy, shares his optimism. After years of global criticism for its gluttonous appetite for drugs, Walters said in a recent interview, ‘The U.S. is now being looked on favorably as an example of […]
Researchers outfitted 210 college students - 179 Americans and 31 Mexicans - with devices that automatically recorded them every 12 1/2 minutes, which amounts to 4 percent of a person’s daily utterances. The researchers found that women speak a little more than 16,000 words a day. Men speak a little less than 16,000 words. The difference is not statistically significant. Psychologist Matthias Mehl of the University of Arizona says the three top talkers in the study - uttering up to 47,000 words a day - were all men. So was the most taciturn subject, who spoke only 700 words a day, on average. Mehl says he and his colleagues were surprised at the outcome. They had tentatively bought into the popular stereotype that women are the more talkative sex. But they were skeptical of the widespread claim that women use three times more words a day then men. The claim got prominent attention with the publication of a 2006 book called The Female Brain. Its author, Louann Brizendine, has been widely quoted claiming that ‘a woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.’ Other sources have claimed an even […]
ALGIERS, Algeria — The Pentagon held a screening in 2003 of ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ a movie about French troops winning control of the Algerian capital. President Bush says that he recently read Alistair Horne’s authoritative history on the war, ‘A Savage War of Peace.’ And last fall, Christopher Harmon, who teaches a course on the Algerian war at the Marine Corps University (MCU) in Washington, lectured marines in Iraq about the Algerian model. Here in Algeria, some of those who participated in that war find little use in the comparison. But the US military – and the American public – continues to study the 1954-62 Algerian war of independence for lessons on how to fight the insurgency in Iraq. ‘There are very, very few examples of modern insurgency, and for urban [insurgencies] it’s basically this [war],’ says Thomas X. Hammes, a US insurgency expert and author of a book on guerrilla warfare, ‘The Sling and the Stone.’ While France ultimately withdrew from Algeria, ‘the French did much of the counterinsurgency very skillfully,’ says Mr. Harmon, who is the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at MCU. ‘The American military has been intrigued by the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
