SHIJIAZHUANG, China - Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater. Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table. ‘People who are buying apartments aren’t thinking about whether there will be water in the future,’ said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city’s dire water situation. For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising […]
Late last month, the Pentagon tapped five major defense contractors to provide wide-ranging support in global counter-narcotics operations. The contract, worth up to $15 billion over the next five years, illustrates the extent to which the Defense Department is relying on contractors to perform critical missions while combat forces are stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response to specific task orders issued under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, companies will develop and deploy new surveillance technologies, train and equip foreign security forces and provide key administrative, logistical and operational support to Defense and other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to the work statement provided to bidders, the vast majority of the drive will be conducted overseas. ‘The contractor shall provide security and related services in support of [counter-narcoterrorism and] related missions to include, but not limited to, intelligence, medical, logistics, canine services, surveillance, counter-surveillance, aerial over-watch, security advisory, etc. The services may be incidental to other activities (i.e., training programs, construction, etc.) or the primary purpose of the [task order],’ the statement said. Three task orders included in the request for proposals issued last December give some sense of […]
Dan Rather’s complaint against CBS and Viacom, its parent company, filed in New York state court on Sept. 19 and seeking $70 million in damages for his wrongful dismissal as ‘CBS Evening News’ anchor, has aroused hoots of derision from a host of commentators. They’ve said that the former anchor is ‘sad,’ ‘pathetic,’ ‘a loser,’ on an ‘ego’ trip and engaged in a mad gesture ‘no sane person’ would do, and that ‘no one in his right mind would keep insisting that those phony documents are real and that the Bush National Guard story is true.’ If the court accepts his suit, however, launching the adjudication of legal issues such as breach of fiduciary duty and tortious interference with contract, it will set in motion an inexorable mechanism that will grind out answers to other questions as well. Then Rather’s suit will become an extraordinary commission of inquiry into a major news organization’s intimidation, complicity and corruption under the Bush administration. No congressional committee would be able to penetrate into the sanctum of any news organization to divulge its inner workings. But intent on vindicating his reputation, capable of financing an expensive legal challenge, and armed with the power […]
Americans remain pessimistic about the state of the environment and want prompt action taken to improve its health, according to the second annual ”America’s Report Card on the Environment”-a national public opinion survey conducted by the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press. ”The public’s overall pessimism and general desire for action has remained constant during the past year,” said Woods Institute senior fellow Jon A. Krosnick, the Frederic O. Glover Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford, who designed the 2006 and 2007 surveys. ”However, Americans have significantly more negative views of business and of President Bush’s handling of the environment than they did a year ago.” The 2007 report card was based on a telephone survey of a representative national sample of 1,001 American adults, who were interviewed from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23. Pessimism and global warming The survey found that 52 percent of Americans expect the world’s natural environment to be in worse shape in 10 years than it is now, compared to 55 percent in 2006-a statistically insignificant difference, Krosnick said. An additional 8 percent said the environment is in ”poor” or ”very […]
Y-a-a-wn. I am so bored. I feel tired and listless, and I can’t think of anything to do. Everyone around me is also bored, which suggests that boredom, as we know it, must be a common universal feeling. Not so, says anthropologist Yasmine Musharabash of the University of Western Australia in Crawley, Australia. Musharabash studied boredom in Warlpiri Aboriginies at Yuemdumu, a settlement in the outback northwest of Alice Springs. She discovered that the Aboriginal idea of boredom is strikingly different from the Western idea of ennui. For the Warlpiri, boredom has nothing to do with having nothing to do. Instead, being bored means there just aren’t enough people around to make life interesting. Our Western idea of boredom is apparently a product of the times. Before the 18th century, Musharabash explains, people weren’t all that bored; world-weariness was experienced only by those with the time to be bored-the rich, the clergy and the unemployed. But soon everyone was bored, suggesting that boredom rode in on the coattails of industrialization and the rise of the middle class. For a long time, boredom was also moral issue, a sin, because it might lead trouble. Kierkegarrd wrote […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
